Originally posted by reh321 I was flabbergasted when the initial response to the Mark ii was "so what?",
It's not logical, that's for sure. I'm overwhelmed with all the tangents in this thread that don't correlate to what people see in photographs they didn't take. Which is the most important thing, the day my own mother doesn't want to look at my photographs is the day my equipment goes on Kijijii. (My wife and kids have already stopped pretending to be interested).
1. I know what a fast Fourier transform is used for but calculus intimidates me, so I don't pretend to know how to demux a RAW file. I know for a fact that if you separate an image into individual wavelengths and plot it on a 2-D graph, the human brain no longer sees the image. Maybe a FFT will help decipher how the Pentax accelerator chip does noise reduction, but that has zero correlation to image quality. The only thing that should matter if you want other people to look at your photographs is how well the colour tone, brightness, contrast and composition of the image produce favorable reactions in the people looking at your photographs. Finer resolution helps, sometimes, but only if the photographer and his/her equipment didn't screw up the other four aspects.
2. If anyone wants a real world, carefully thought out and executed (maybe not perfect, but definitely better than DPR's poor effort) comparison, there is a home page article at Pentax Forums that does an excellent job of comparing noisy images produced by K-1 and K-1 II. We can certainly argue about whether or not tiny pieces of the K-1 image that have different colours than surrounding tiny bits are real dust particles or random bits of noise, but there can be no argument that the accelerator chip produces better colour in noisy images. Being able to get close to the same results using external noise reduction software just shows that the designers of the accelerator chip knew what they were doing. What the accelerator chip does is give the photographer a full stop of high quality noise reduction without any extra effort or time. It might also be worthwhile looking at a work of art at high magnification, so you can get a better appreciation for how lumpy the ink or paint is and how rough and dirty the paper or canvas is.
3. If DPR is relying on clicks from current or potential Pentax users to pay their bills, they are truly lost. On the other hand, Sony, Nikon and Canon users are just as neurotic as Pentax users, so if DPR can convince those people (who greatly outnumber Pentax users) to click on DPR's Pentax reviews, the great expense spent to produce these high quality reviews might pay for itself. The review this thread revolves around is designed to calm the fears of people who don't own Pentax cameras, so they can convince themselves that they have made a good choice in the equipment they either own or wish they owned. If DPR reviews have the power to kill sales for Pentax cameras, Ricoh would have had no choice but to pull the plug on the Pentax line a long time ago (a couple of years ago is almost forever in Internet years). Aliens don't land in the middle of camera stores with valid credit cards; everyone who buys any brand of camera has pre-existing preferences and will measure any review against how it addresses those preferences, deducing for themselves whether the review is clean or noisy. The #1 problem with reviews is that the reviewer believes they know more than their readers.
4. It is obvious to me that Pentax cameras are designed by engineers, not marketers. Any marketer worth her salt knows that you can't force users to do something because it is good for them, you have to offer a choice so the user believes they are making the best choice, even if the choices provided are constructed so the best choice is painfully obvious. After all, why have an "M" mode on cameras with 86,000 segment metering? I'm a marketer, not an engineer, if I had designed the K-1 II, not only would you be able to switch off the accelerator chip, I would have told the engineers to program A/B comparisons in LiveView that make non-accelerated photography look like the worst crap ever to come out of a Polaroid camera.