[slartibartfast01]

Oh noes, here goes the wild and conspiratorial speculations again. If you come to these conclusions about camera testers I can't imagine what wild scenarios you make up for sports, politics or news. I see this kind of "logic" elsewhere and it's not pretty.

1. They're a bit lazy and have only one camera.
2. They don't have unlimited time to spend on shooting Pentax studio scene.
3. They use the same set up and tripod for all cameras and consider this part of the "even field" of testing
4. They have a standard lens per mount to enable cross body comparisons and don't want to change.
5. The lack of electronic shutter means they can't do the usual work around

It's unlikely that dpreview will get to the bottom of the shutter shock and find out how wide range of scenarios are affected or do any serious investigation. Unless there are no big releases in the coming weeks that is.

All dpreivew K-3 III sample galleries have a lot of soft shots. The recent DA2040 gallery being perhaps the exception. I think it's pretty clear that at least the camera at dpreview suffers from it.

The mod did imply that they use a flimsy tripod to show up any shutter shock. So as far as they are concerned as long as they use the same setup for all their tests that is fine. If they admitted this and added a note to say that users were unlikely to see the same results on a solid tripod it wouldn't be so bad.

[Kunzite]

i haven't got time to catch up with the thread here, but fwiw I don't think it's a faulty camera - they talked previously about asking Ricoh for one to review - I think it's far more likely to be DPR getting some setting wrong due to not being sufficiently familiar with Pentax, and we shouldn't jump to assume bias or antagonism on their part - it just fuels a bad reputation regarding Pentaxians

It doesn't looks like it's a setting; I bet it's due to their camera support (tripod or whatever).
DPR apparently investigated the camera's setting, but not other factors (so far). And as was said before, they found shutter shock for the D780, too (quite bad there!) - and other cameras as well.

[gatorguy]

and the accompanying thread---with a DPR Pentax SLR forum mod jumping in: Shutter shock test - K-3 III with DA35/2.8 and FA50/1.4: Pentax SLR Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review

This particular mod once deleted my post because it was "incendiary/pejorative", because I used the phrase "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander"(You read that correctly.) in terms of suggesting that DPR's pros/cons ought to be consistent. When challenged in a PM, he/she said I "ought to know" what the offensive aspect of this was.

DPR has some issues....

Well let's see how my latest post there fares. The previous two were immediately posted, but the third one is being held for moderation:

"Gatorguy
Since there's been a lack of confirmation from other users seeing the same soft images at low ISO's so far in this thread I wouldn't personally be clinging to the claim that the K3III is inherently flawed. I might be far more inclined to see the specific DPR camera and lens combo as an outlier until proven otherwise.

dpthoughts
I wonder if this is similar to the RAW denoising issue. That one and the shutter blur issue are subtle and don't jump into your eyes at normal everyday shots published at normal everyday internet sizes e.g. on social media.

Instead, It requires careful and diligent observation at 100%, as raw as possible, and preferably as an A/B comparison.

it also requires a really sharp lens, and one which is not decentered. Both might be a bit rare in Pentax land, but the combination of both might be really rare luck. DPR got one, but only because it was hand-selected and delivered directly from Ricoh Japan. And even that one struggles to be as sharp or as centered as the competition.

Most Pentax users instead just never have a chance to see the issue, as their lenses are just not sharp enough, and therefore, most users deny the problem, of course.

Same as with the RAW denoising issue which only DPR revealed for the K-1 II for the first time, but no Pentax users did/could do.

*Gatorguy
I don't think Pentax users are any less accustomed to sharp lenses as other camera body owners. Every brand has their budget consumer glass and their premium and/or prosumer/pro lenses. For instance my DFA50 would be considered one of the latter as would my value-priced Sigma 18-35, Sigma Art 35, DA*200 and DA*300, and DFA 70-200. So in my case YES, sharp is expected and sharp is achieved. You talk as tho you know all about Pentax glass so I would expect you already know the quality of the Pentax glass I own.

My lenses are not unusual ones for Pentax camera owners to have so I don't agree that Pentax camera users don't know good glass.

Heck, last year before Covid struck I had a Sony pro offer to let me borrow his own favorite portrait lens at a shoot, glass he said had more character and sharpness than any other he owned. That lens was a Pentax DA*200 adapted for his camera.

*Comment is awaiting moderation approval."

[Kunzite]

It doesn't looks like dpthoughts' posts are held for moderation.

[Wheatfield]

Which is the only lens DPReview used on the K-3 III.
In my opinion not the best choice. They should've used a macro or star lens to archieve highest sharpness.

The DA* 55/1.4 is a star lens, and is very, very good glass. It is capable of amazingly high quality results.

[Kunzite]

The DA* 55/1.4 is a star lens, and is very, very good glass. It is capable of amazingly high quality results.

But it's not perfect in the corners.

[Wheatfield]

Well, then it could be faulty unit and or poor camera handling. I’m not really concerned about this thing. It is interesting, but as I’v not found anything to support this, it is not something I’ll worry about. I’m also running with the latest FW.

I'm not sure if it being a faulty camera is a better excuse. This is, after all, a $2.5k camera.

[gatorguy]

I'm not sure if it being a faulty camera is a better excuse. This is, after all, a $2.5k camera.

Even $10K camera's can be flawed on receipt, as can $200,000 cars, $1 million dollar homes, 10 million dollar CEO's, and $Billion dollar court judgments.

Money doesn't buy perfect 100% of the time.

[Wheatfield]

But it's not perfect in the corners.

It does need to be stopped down a bit, but that's not unusual for any lens, and shutter shock is a separate issue from soft corners.

I think we have had the culprit pointed out, which is DPREVIEW has a faulty test bench (a cheap, flimsy tripod).
With my Feisol Traveller tripod, shutter shock was a problem for me on earlier Pentax cameras, when I switched to a somewhat heavier Feisol tripod, the problem went away.

If we are entertaining conspiracy theories anyway, how about DPReview is now on the mirrorless train and is gearing their tests to make SLR cameras look as bad as possible.
What better way to make an entire breed of camera look bad than to mount them on tripods that are not capable of taming their natural vibrations?

[slartibartfast01]

It does need to be stopped down a bit, but that's not unusual for any lens, and shutter shock is a separate issue from soft corners.



I think we have had the culprit pointed out, which is DPREVIEW has a faulty test bench (a cheap, flimsy tripod).

With my Feisol Traveller tripod, shutter shock was a problem for me on earlier Pentax cameras, when I switched to a somewhat heavier Feisol tripod, the problem went away.



If we are entertaining conspiracy theories anyway, how about DPReview is now on the mirrorless train and is gearing their tests to make SLR cameras look as bad as possible.

What better way to make an entire breed of camera look bad than to mount them on tripods that are not capable of taming their natural vibrations?

I suspect they use a flimsy tripod to emphasise differences between cameras which is fair enough but they should be upfront that they are doing that. They should also do a second test on a solid tripod to show that there is no issue in real life.

[luftfluss]

This is what Richard Butler had to say...

Richard Butler The scene was shot several times, with more than one lens, with multiple attempts made to optimize focus. After repeated re-shoots, the increased sharpness at other shutter speeds strongly point to the slight softness coming from shake.
We then tried methods such as mirror-up to reduce that possibility but without an electronic first curtain mode (which a lot of recent ILCs have used to get round similar problems), there was no easy way to resolve it. The fact that e-shutter shots are sharp and those speeds adds further weight to the idea that it's mirror/shutter shock.
We made sure we were pretty confident about the source before publishing anything. The bigger question is whether a different body or updated firmware can address it (we hope so). But we didn't publish anything until we'd shot, shot again, tried to exhaust all options and then shot again.

[mtkeller]

This is what Richard Butler had to say...

And yet they still wrote nonsense about ISO 100 and 200 (rather than naming shutter speeds) and included zero details about other lenses or even the problematic shutter speeds in their report.

[jslifoaw]

You can use the DPR widget to compare the same body with different settings; put the K-3 III in all four regions and choose some low and high ISOs. What's really odd is if you compare different shots (e.g. different ISOs), there isn't a great deal of consistency as to which parts of the image look sharper or softer, though there is somewhat of a trend that higher ISOs (1600-3200) look sharper and a tad noisier than ISO 100-200 with some outlier areas within each image (just drag the square around).

While it looks like they tested multiple lenses, the softness is still peculiar at the low ISOs. Also, I assume they use default sharpening and if so, I have no idea why Pentax continues to default to regular sharpening - one of the first things I do is switch to fine sharpening at +1.

I will also note that my K-1 was very finicky with light lenses (up to around 400g, prime or zoom) with respect to shutter shock between 1/100 to 1/250. My hit rate was higher at lower shutter speeds. When I used heavier lenses, the issue mostly went away. It's possible that certain lens+body combinations create a very peculiar weight distribution / centre of mass.

[Tesla]

DPR staff have replied. Fourth tab in the comments. They say they tried multiple lenses, but haven't said anything about MarBa's test.

Edit.. missed the staff quoted a few posts up.

[slartibartfast01]

DPR staff have replied. Fourth tab in the comments. They say they tried multiple lenses, but haven't said anything about MarBa's test.

Edit.. missed the staff quoted a few posts up.

They also don't mention the tripod setup.



---------- Post added 06-01-21 at 10:56 PM ----------

This is from 2013 about their test setup
"After many, many months of design and testing we are happy to announce the official unveiling of our studio test scene. The new scene was designed to address certain drawbacks with the previous test scene, as well as providing the opportunity to show more real-world relevant information about how cameras behave."
A flimsy tripod doesn't tally with "real-world information about how cameras behave"