Originally posted by Col It appears Ned Bunnell lays the blame for the initial 8 frame limit entirely on the software engineers in Japan messing up. He's really getting a bit blunt ATM with Japan HQ
I highly doubt the engineers forgot or messed up. It's just some marketing speak for a release date that didn't give the engineers enough time to make efficient use of camera resources. I think we will see quite a few improvements in firmware as the months move by. The nice thing is Pentax does bother to dedicate some of their people to keep improving on a product in software once it is released.
Originally posted by falconeye Nothing is simple here.
The engineers had to squeeze out the last bit of performance out of a processor introduced with the K-m and made for the 1.1 fps 645D. I.e., they all of a sudden had to fully process and then compress 16.4 MP 14 Bit raw data at 7fps in real time. I can very well understand how they missed this performance goal on the first deadline.
Thanks for the reality check falconeye.
I agree with you.
I also think it's likely that the K-5 is using a lot of the same electronics as the K-7 to save on production costs, which would explain the processing speed bumps compared to the K-7. The board with CPU, RAM, and support components are probably exactly the same. The money pinchers probably told the engineers to work with what they had CPU/RAM wise as they were spending a lot on other parts of the camera (AF sensor, integrating the Sony CMOS sensor).
For example, I can set the K-7 to ISO 6400 with high noise reduction and get 13 full speed RAW DNG frames before the buffer gets saturated and the camera slows down. Add an extra 2MP, 14-bit raw, and more noise reduction without modifying the underlying code nets us about what the K-5 is currently able to do.
It also explains why this firmware update will at least initially only work with PEF format as the engineers probably are better able to extract speed out of that full pipeline to the SD card than DNG. If it had a physically larger buffer I don't see why PEF would be the only format to get a speed increase.
Originally posted by TiminyCricket flash.
I highly doubt it has flash memory for the buffer, especially since using it for a buffer would be questionable given that it has limited lifespan. It's most likely DDR2 SDRAM and most likely the same exact amount the K-7 has. Firmware and custom setting storage on the other hand is flash or some other variant that can store data without power.