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Hey guys!

I hope you don't mind me posting this though Pentax gear plays only the second role in the setup for this image....but an important one. Waiting for the stars yesterday I screwed my Pentax HD 1.4x and my 2.0x TCs to the 130/F7 Apo telescope. Then adapted the Olympus OM-D EM-5 of my wife in video mode plus lossless (crop) 2 x digizoom. I think this must be ca. 5000 mm focal length.

I shot a 2 minute video and pressed it through Autostakkert2. This is what came out:


You see the Vallis Alpes and Cassini A and B in the left part, also the 2,5 km high Mons Piton and Mons Pico

I don't know if the same (lossless digizoom) is also possible with the K-1. If yes (or anyway) maybe a it is worth giving it a try for the one or the other....

I am tempted to stack my 1.4 and 1.7 teleconverters on my 8RC and try this.

Does the K-1 support video recordings in crop mode to get a lossless zoom effect?

Yes. It will do aps-c and record video at 1080p.

....so there is a downsampling from 4.800 x 3.200 to 1920 x 1080 and a resulting zoom effect of 1.5 relative to the full frame? It would be great for a digital zoom if the video were grabbed directly 1/1 from the sensor with 1080p like in other brands. That would result in a "lossless" digital zoom with factor 4.5! And no downsampling would be necessary.

True, it would be really nice if it did a non-downsampled video crop mode like some other bodies. I also wish that when they firmware added the 1:1 aspect ratio for photos that they would have enabled that for video too.

I will say for your average shooter that the choice makes good sense. I frequently shoot with primes only, and the crop is super handy (and zooms by just the right amount) when doing ordinary shooting. On my canon, the crop factor was too high to be useful in a lot of cases. If only I had time to write custom firmware for the K-1 to have the best of both worlds!