The March issues of a number of Japanese camera magazines were published this Saturday, and they all have reviews of the Pentax K-3 Mark III. The one I bought was Capa. It has the K-3 III on the cover and a four-page review of the camera inside. Here it is a link to the cover. Please control your frustration that that young lady has got her hands on it before you.
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It’s worth mentioning up front that the style of reviews in the Japanese press is quite different from some reviews and discussion you find in English online. They are more interested in what you
can do with the camera, rather than pitting one camera against the others or debunking manufacturer claims. Also, the magazines focus more on the JPEG performance. Photos are provided, but often too small to really say that much. Video is not covered at all.
Body and viewfinder
There is not much new to say about this because Pentax has covered this quite thoroughly in their own communications. The body is small and feels very high quality. The viewfinder is the top class in APS-C. Not only is it bigger, but it is also 10% brighter.
AF and continuous shooting
41 of the 101 points are selectable using the 8-way joystick on the back of the camera. AF points go right up close to the sides of the frame allowing focusing more like a mirrorless camera. The real-world speed is 11 fps in AF.C mode and 12 fps in AF.S. They showed a sequence of shots of an approaching train using AF.C taken with the DA* 50-135 at 11 fps. I don’t know how difficult it was for them to get a whole sequence in focus, but it was a clear, in-focus series. It’s interesting that they used the 50-135 because it’s not known as a speedy AF lens. It seems that the advantages of the AF system will be felt whatever lens you are using. The text also mentions that the system is good at keeping eyes in focus for portraits and good at birds in flight.
Image quality
The new sensor is BSI and with PRIME V and the Accelerator II it produces better image quality over the whole range of ISO values.The “fine sharpness” mode is also much improved to improve edge sharpness in in a natural way without emphasizing noise. There is a shot of a cat at ISO 1,600,000, presumably in near complete darkness. While it looks noisy as you would expect, it does not look worse than to top ISO of Pentax cameras in the past. Both. varieties of noise are everywhere, but there is at least some detail in there. It's no worse than my K-5 IIs at 51,200. A shot of bottles at ISO 12,800 looked very clean and with vivid colors. In a different magazine, an enlarged ISO 3,200 shot looked completely noise free to my eyes. The Capa review also mentioned the improved colors and IQ at lower ISOs. Overall, they describe the image quality as highly advanced, with high-sensitivity performance you would normally expect of full frame cameras.
Image stabilization and other features
The 5-axis 5.5-stop image stabilization is very effective. They were able to take 1/4 of a second exposures of a waterfall and commented it was the kind of image you would expect to have been taken with a tripod. Another magazine had a steady, handheld 1 second exposure of car light trails at night. Back to Capa, in this section they also mentioned real resolution and the low-pass simulator, but it seems to be more or less the same as previous models. They talk about the convenience of the new advanced hyper program mode. They said they had found it especially helpful for sports shooting. Finally they talked about using old lenses with the camera. The new function to record aperture in exif is useful, and the viewfinder makes it a lot easier to focus the lenses.
The final comments on the camera are that although Pentax decided to call it “K-3 Mark III”, this is a camera one rank up from what has come before.
So what I took away from this is that the camera is ready and just held up in production. The “character” of the camera is going to be very similar to the K-7/K-5/K-3 cameras, just better in every way. And the happiest thing is that it seems even existing lenses (vintage and current) will benefit from all the improvements. The photos were taken with the DA*50-135, the DA*55, the DA 18-135 and the DA 20-40, current but not even the latest ones.
---------- Post added 02-20-21 at 06:27 PM ----------
Oh. And I forgot to mention that the magazines once again mentioned that the price would be "around 200,000 yen". That is below what the K-1 II sells for, even three years after release.