[Image Enthusiast]

Hello everyone, I'm pretty much new to the forum, except for a few idiot-proof digital queries from a periodic film head, but have been a big fan of Pentax's digital cameras, probably more so than anyone else's, for years.

To begin with, so that people see where my message is coming from, my photography tends to lean towards the artsy and esoteric, film over digital, and flights of fancy over high performance functionality - and I get that that may not be everyone's cup of tea.

However, I think there's points that are worth raising whatever kind of photography you're into, and also as to why Pentax keeps revisiting its K3 concept.

I've been buying digital cameras for twenty years, starting with the Minolta DImage and Sweet Digital cameras way back, which I still rate.

Beyond that though, I've often found digital cameras disappointing, and have stuck with a number of film cameras.

In the first few years of the digital revolution, something interested me a lot - manafacturers such as Canon, Minolta and Pentax seemed to be going to huge lengths to recreate the imprint and image make-up of various or collections of their film cameras, with often quite interesting results. While I found the cameras of the first decade of the 2000s lacking on the resolution, low-light performance and digital noise front, by the end of the decade I thought manafactuters were beginning to make some cameras both with high performance and real character, most of all Pentax.

To me, this process came to a head in about 2012-13. In that year, I think Pentax produced a whole sequence of cameras that were absolutely fantastic - the K3, the K30, the K5ii/iis and the K50.

Why did I think these cameras were particularly good ? Because they had a superb balance of high resolution - for the time - and body, presence and richness to the images that I've seen in no other digital cameras. I find the image to be strikingly thick, lush and genuinely and naturalistically *present* in that Pentax sequence of cameras of that time. This balance wasn't entirely unique to Pentax, as Nikon managed something similar of the year with their Nikon1V1, but no one did it better or more fully than Pentax.

What I see see since then, is that all manafacturers, including Pentax, have been on a high-resolution, high-performance arms race, getting further and further away from the film templates they used to recreate their cameras, and to me, often producing cameras with thinner and thinner, sparser and again, to me, often more and more clinical and sterile images.

This is why I don't believe it's any coincidence at all that Pentax keeps revisiting its K3 concept, as a best-seller ; it has that excellent balance of richness and performance that Pentax had mastered most of all at that time, and that's why it remains among Pentax's most popular cameras of all eras, film or digital.

I think if both Pentax and other manafacturers want to capture photographers' imaginations, they have to look again at what was happening at that time, what was going right ; stay in touch with their digital template reproductions of their film cameras' images, and see how to integrate that with higher resolution and performance sensibly, rather than gratuitously.

Hope this was interesting , and thanks for listening !

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Last edited by Image Enthusiast; 12-29-2020 at 05:32 AM.

I agree completely. So much of what goes into the design is there because that's what people are already used to. Similar to the reason for having a single-action mode in Browning's design for the first semi-automatic handguns - the only reason for it was that people were already used to single-action revolvers. (I.e., having to manually cock the hammer with one's thumb, as opposed to double-action, in which the pull of the trigger both cocks and releases the hammer - nowadays, more than a century later, they have "striker-fired" semiautomatics that have no hammer at all.)

I think the evolutionary process is to gradually eliminate functionally unnecessary features, such as the optical viewfinder and the mirror. I'm glad I got the cameras I did when I did, because I favor the increasingly archaic features of film cameras, myself. I almost never use "live view", and can't imagine myself using a touch-screen to focus a camera.

[Bertrand3000]

I'm glad I got the cameras I did when I did, because I favor the increasingly archaic features of film cameras, myself. I almost never use "live view", and can't imagine myself using a touch-screen to focus a camera.

Same. And I never used a film camera ; still, the OVF is what makes a DSLR shines. It's true, its image is not computer-generated. Live View is only used when strictly necessary, even on the KP.

[Paul the Sunman]

If the universe had popped into existence only 10 minutes ago (maybe it did!) and we were here on Earth with our current technology levels, no-one would think to invent a DSLR, or film. Just like no-one would think to invent the internal combustion engine. The DSLR is a slightly bizarre and archaic analogue design. Mirrorless is clearly the now.

But in reality we are our history as well as our present, and the richer for it. No camera company is more cognizant of this than Pentax (I leave the Hasselblads and Leicas out of this). The shear attention to detail we are seeing in the painstaking development of the K3iii attests to this. OVF and grip are being evolved with the user experience front and centre. And although none of us fully understand it, the recently announced nod to aperture coupling for K/M manual lenses is not something the big boys would do. Young people may point at us and laugh, but there is a certain richness to the Pentax experience and Pentax images that keeps me hanging round. (Even Pentax Forums is part of the experience, though of course not attributable to Ricoh/Pentax.)

Bring it on Pentax, however slowly.

[UncleVanya]

I find this thread puzzling. By implication the op has suggested that cameras like the k-70, KP, and K-1 are sterile and lack the magic of the K-3... does anyone else think that? The K-3 is the most modern Pentax body I own, but the results I see from the newer bodies don’t look sterile. Furthermore, the used Sony A7RII I just obtained hasn’t felt sterile at all. Nor my m43 gear or the Samsung NX gear i one had.

I like an ovf, I like Pentax colors and ergonomics; but I find it possible to manipulate most any camera to make images that are not sterile and have character. At least that’s how I feel. Maybe I’m delusional.

I do see photographs that are overly processed and sterile produced by some of the mega pixel monsters of modern day - but I place the blame on the photographers not the equipment. The reputation for sterile photos may come from the style choices people are making and the huge numbers of people shooting the gear that have no clue about how to connect with people visually.

Despite my difference of opinion with the OP... I find this a great start to posting here and look forward to seeing more thought provoking posts in the future.

[Image Enthusiast]

Hello everyone, and thanks for everyone's really interesting replies. I did preface the thread with a bit of a subjectivity health warning, as I know everyone might not entirely agree with the characterisation.

I have a K1, and I do find it a bit of a frustrating, nearly-brilliant camera. There is a real grandeur to some of the images, and I still think it's better than any other digital full-frame camera out there ; the problem, for me, is that some images quite often lack the thickness and body of what I would regard as Pentax's 'golden period' from just a couple of years before. I'm able to correct this, for the kind of photography I'm into, with what some might see as eccentric, low-performance and esoteric lenses from the '70s and '80s, but I can find it a bit of a stretch.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it's gradually gained a reputation among people who usually use Canon and Nikon as a fantastic long-distance landscape camera ; it really is. I find its images grand, but compared to a K3 or K30, a bit distanced, thinned-out and sparse. I've also found it good for portrait photography, at the other extreme, but overall not as versatile as those earlier cameras. I do remember that the K1 development was held up for a long time, and I've always wondered whether I would have preferred if it had been completed a couple of years earlier. I don't think anyone's made a genuinely all-time great full-frame DSLR camera yet to compete with the film cameras, but for me the K1 is closest.

[UncleVanya]

Other than the k-3 all the cameras on your list are using the same 16mp sensor. That sensor was pretty awesome. Good size pixels and great dynamic range.

Post some images of the ones that are right and those that lack soul. Maybe it will guide the conversation. I’m not seeing what you are but I’d like samples to understand what you mean.

[Image Enthusiast]

A fair enough suggestion, and hopefully a bit later on I can be back online with some time to go through what I mean.

[UncleVanya]

A fair enough suggestion, and hopefully a bit later on I can be back online with some time to go through what I mean.

Awesome. I’m looking forward to it. I know a certain photographer who left Pentax, before he left he used the FA 77 and then the FA* 85. For him the 85 gave better results, mostly in the work post production. The images were closer to his desired final product. Both lenses worked and he got images that were within his vision, but one took less care and feeding. Is that related to your experiences or am I on the wrong track?

[house]

My preferences amongst my digital Pentax cameras would be K-1 > K-5 > K-3 II > K100D

The K-3 II is better in many ways to the K-5 but I still feel the K-5 had something.

The K-1 produces the nicest files, I tend to shoot flat profile with slightly increased contrast and saturation. Things come out so smooth looking. You can have a photo that looks detailed and rich without being overly contrasty. The apsc cameras can't quite do this somehow but I don't understand why.

I always use my raw files but develop them close to the sooc jpegs.

[automorphism]

Personally, I think today's cameras from most manufacturers capture my imagination the most. The cameras back then were more frustrating, with fewer lenses that I liked. The ISO performance in the K50 days was about one stop worse than now and that was extremely frustrating. Now I feel that they are just right. Keep in mind I am a bird shooter though so such things like one stop of ISO performance actually impacts my daily shooting and makes for far less postprocessing.

If I were a portrait or landscape photographer then cameras like the K5 are already superb.

[Apet-Sure]

I find this thread puzzling. By implication the op has suggested that cameras like the k-70, KP, and K-1 are sterile and lack the magic of the K-3... does anyone else think that?

I guess it depends on how you define the concept 'sterile'. I'm not sure what the OP means by this. Most of the time when my shots lack character it's because I wasn't paying attention to the character of the lighting in the scene. It seems to me, especially after reading Bryan Peterson's 'Understanding Composition', that composition and lighting have more to do with the impact of an image than the recording device used. I don't own any Limited lenses or others said to have 'pixie dust'. Certainly some lenses from the film era were known for their 'character'. Perhaps this influences the nostalgia for film cameras, as do specific films. There's the CCD vs. CMOS sensor discussion in the digital age. My CCD-based K10D has produced some marvelous images. But so have my CMOS-based K-5iis and KP. The color accuracy of the KP's jpegs has been especially noticeable and enjoyable. I think I've captured images with character using my various lenses. We all see and think differently, so our choices of image recording devices will always be based on personal taste.

[Madaboutpix]

From my experience of editing and revisiting K-7 and K-3 DNG files for more than a decade - admittedly just two models, but with different-generation-and-provenance sensors - I have frankly come away with a sense that, once they are processed, the similarities between them are more striking than the differences, at least as far as the colours are concerned. And they seem to be more strongly affected by the RAW converter used in processing and decisions made there than by the sensors' respective RAW outputs.

Thus, the final product I export and upload owes at least as much to, say, Adobe's or DxO's interpretation of the Pentax DNGs as to the properties of the sensors and A/D converters themselves. This goes to the point where I'm able to make K-7 output look pretty similar to K-3 output, just by applying the same DxO camera profile to RAW files from both cameras. For my taste, the K-3/K-3 II/K-70/KP profile in PhotoLab does the K-7 files much better justice than the K-5/K-7/K20D/K-r/K-01 profile that DxO offers for them. (I should note that I'm a friend of vibrant but still natural-looking or somehow believable colours.) It even matters significantly where I upload them and have them hosted, given that for example SmugMug will apply its own algorithms to my exported JPEGs.

Notice that I'm not saying that Pentax DSLRs don't differ markedly in their RAW output. They do, and I'm certainly looking forward to what the K-3 III DNGs will bring to the table.

[vector]

I like my K3 a lot more than my K5, and I really like the K5. Neither holds a candle to my K1 though. I am interested to see what base ISO image quality looks like from the new K3III as well. While I acknowledge my apsc cameras are capable of beautiful images, and in a blind test at normal viewing sizes I likely couldn't tell you what took what, I can tell in Lightroom what camera produced the DNG file, and I am more often wowed by the raw files from K1. They are cleaner and easier to push and manipulate without worry. I would like a better sensor for my second camera than the K3 so I am waiting to see if it will be a K3III or a second K1...

[tibbitts]

I have a K-5 (and a K-5ii) and don't find anything "golden era" about them, although I like them and think they're fine cameras. I'm sure the K-3 was an improvement overall, although I would have bought one by now if I believed the sensor was as big a jump as from the K-7 to the K-5. I also have another 24mp camera now and while the extra mp plus not having the aa filter produces higher resolution, there wasn't the jump in dynamic range that came with the K-5. I've found that you need good lenses and technique to take advantage of the 24mp, while much less equipment, effort and skill is required to benefit from extra dynamic range.