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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-31-2013, 03:16 PM
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A Pentax rangefinder similar to the Fujifilm X-Pro 1 -- but with a full-frame sensor -- and weather sealed -- now that would be a product that would get some attention...
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
05-31-2013, 01:22 AM
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You appear to greatly favor zooms and that seems to be the main factor driving your decision-making. That aside, and I'm not sure how literally to take your comment about wanting a better portrait lens, but if I was really thinking in terms of portraiture, I would rather have a faster prime (both for low-light portraits, and for the shallower depth of field), notably the 77mm f/1.8 Limited.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-31-2013, 12:24 AM
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To the original question, no, I don't think mirrorless will replace DSLR's amongst professionals, or enthusiasts who aspire to shoot like professionals. Regular people who just want a nice camera to take pictures of the family? Sure. It's already happening, much to Pentax's dismay.
As much as everyone would love to see a full-frame Pentax DSLR, the place where they are really getting their butts kicked IMO is from the other direction, by the exciting mirrorless cameras like the Olympus E-M5 and the Fuji X-system cameras. It seemed a few years ago that Pentax had thoroughly outpaced Olympus as a serious camera manufacturer, but suddenly Olympus has a trump card in their mirrorless system that makes them look a lot smarter than Pentax.
While it's impossible to imagine a world where Pentax overtakes Nikon and Canon as the dominant full-frame system, it's painfully easy to imagine one where Pentax instead of Olympus produced the hip mirrorless camera that sells like pancakes. Instead they gave us the stillborn K-01. (But, hey, it was designed by Marc Newson....)
The closer attention I pay to mirrorless developments, the more I think Pentax is deeply "out of it".
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-31-2013, 12:09 AM
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Actually vinyl record sales today are on the rise and especially amongst younger music listeners.
Anyway it's a bad analogy (audiophiles to photographers) because audiophiles are consuming sound while photographers are producing (not consuming) images. The better analogy would be to recording engineers, and in that field tube gear is still among the most prized and is used every day to create records (which are then consumed digitally).
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-31-2013, 12:03 AM
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It would be ironic if Pentax released a digital rangefinder, since they never produced a film rangefinder (to the best of my knowledge). Indeed isn't the name of the company from the "Pentaprism" in an SLR?
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Forum: Homepage & Official Pentax News
05-04-2013, 06:26 PM
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A moment ago you said it was all Americans and now it's just a "few frequent posters". Which is it?
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Forum: Homepage & Official Pentax News
05-04-2013, 06:19 PM
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Yes, it's quite an indictment of the American character that Pentax raised their lens prices by nearly 50% overnight and it isn't accepted with a smile and a shrug. As soon as Pentax comes to your nuanced understanding of Americans they will realize there's only one reasonable choice to be made, and that's to withdraw from the U.S. market entirely.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
05-03-2013, 11:51 PM
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Which Nikon is the equivalent of the 35mm Limited?
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
04-24-2012, 07:41 PM
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I appear to have a 32-bit kernel, from my quick check in terminal of the kernel, as far as I understand it.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
04-24-2012, 07:34 PM
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I have 6 GB of RAM, but I'm on OSX 10.5.8, which is several versions behind the times, so it might not be 64-bit. (There are technical reasons for not having upgraded OSX due to my music and video production software, it's not entirely laziness that has kept me at 10.5).
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
04-24-2012, 07:17 PM
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I am perhaps a little dense -- I don't really understand why it would be better to import photos from 2 32 GB cards back to back, instead of 1 64 GB card in one session, in terms of hard drive fragmentation. If you could explain that a little better it would be helpful.
edit: assuming all cards are full, i.e. 64 GB of photos incoming from either two 32 GB cards or one 64 GB card...
thanks
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
04-24-2012, 06:50 PM
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I'm using a Mac Pro with a traditional 2 TB hard drive to store my photos on. My admittedly vague understanding of things is that OSX doesn't need to defrag hard drives, or does it in the background or something -- my roundabout way of saying, I have never defragged a hard drive on a Mac, though I used to do it regularly on my PC.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
04-24-2012, 06:00 PM
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
04-24-2012, 05:46 PM
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I've been using a good SanDisk 32 GB SDHC card since I got my K7 (30MB/s, class 10). It works great.
I'm now adding a second card and I wonder if I will be okay if I get the 64 GB version of the same card. Does the K7 support cards this large?
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Forum: Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Other Camera Brands
11-11-2011, 10:45 PM
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I just stumbled across this story elsewhere and I'm amazed. This is bad stuff. I feel bad for Oly users. Who knows where it will end up...
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
07-08-2011, 01:24 AM
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I'd trust, as much as I dare, Consumer Reports for reviews of things like washers, dryers, microwaves -- things which are used mostly without a sense of aesthetics, pleasure or other visceral sensations. This flat rules out cars and cameras. CR will get you to buy a car that runs forever and makes you miserable to sit in for every moment of that eternity. Likewise I might send someone to CR who was looking to spend $200 on a point & shoot, just to get them out of my hair, but they have essentially nothing to say to someone who is a connoisseur of lenses, of a comfortable handgrip, of the slight differences in color rendition between three or four mostly remarkable cameras. What could they possibly tell you about these things? They could no sooner measure this stuff in a lab than they could grade Beethoven's symphonies on a 10-point scale for "Recognizability", "Complexity", "Hummability", and "Grandeur".
I've never seen a single review in Consumer Reports that had a point-of-view -- in fact they pride themselves on not having a point-of-view, in being objective. But about the arts, there is only point-of-view. It's all a matter of taste, apart from the occasional glaring technical misstep. So, by their own standards, they are incapable of saying anything relevant about the core experience of using a camera to be a photographer (as opposed to using it to be a consumer).
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Forum: Pentax Camera and Field Accessories
06-03-2011, 06:12 AM
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Actually the Romulans have had this technology for quite some time, but it's good to see it finally making it's way to Earth.
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Forum: Monthly Photo Contests
03-02-2011, 10:50 PM
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This is my contest entry.
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Forum: Monthly Photo Contests
02-28-2011, 11:12 PM
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That is one creepy bird all right.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-25-2011, 10:31 PM
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I'd say your first problem, which is kind of evident in the photo at the top (not sure what's up with the crop, but like others have pointed out.. that ain't right...), is that you are shooting at f/22. Without knowing which lens you are using, most likely you are going to experience severe degradation of sharpness stopped that far down. For example, if you check out the dpreview tests of the DA 16-45mm, you will see that sharpness starts falling off after f/8, and then from f/16 to f/22 it degrades dramatically. That may be why the trees in the first photo look out of focus compared to their reflection in the water -- they're nearer the edge of the frame and at f/22 you are losing it all the way around the edges.
For me between the overall softness of the picture, then the apparently excessive post-processing to manufacture the sharpness that wasn't there in the lens, it's almost impossible to evaluate the noise in the photograph.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-24-2011, 08:18 AM
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-19-2011, 08:08 PM
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On another note, if you move a page, whether one you created or someone else created, (usually in order to rename it), it breaks the links to the old page. Specifically, it creates what are called "double redirects". The Wiki software will only redirect one time and then the visitor will have to manually click through a bunch of re-direct pages to find the eventual article. I have been going through this week and cleaning up the double re-directs each night. Since I don't intend to do this forever, I'd like to point out how you can do this yourself at the time you move a page, so that the site doesn't turn into a mess as it gets bigger and bigger:
--- on the left Navigation menu there is a link to "Special Pages". If you don't see it, go to the Main Page, where it will definitely be visible.
--- Click through to Special Pages.
--- the 3rd item from the top is "Double redirects." Click it.
--- now what you see is a list of all of the double redirects created by moving pages. If you move one page it would not be unusual to see around five such double redirects (per page you moved), and as the site grows larger this would be expected to increase.
The entries will look like this:
1. DA series (edit) → DA lens series → Pentax DA lens series
--- Click on "edit" (it's a hyperlink).
--- this takes you to the Edit page of the original redirect. In this case, I have changed the name of the page "DA lens series" to "Pentax DA lens series" in order to match the way others have been naming the lens series pages. All I have to do to fix the redirect is make the exact same change in this redirect field. Initially it will look like this:
#REDIRECT [[DA lens series]]
I simply add "Pentax" inside the brackets so that it looks like this:
#REDIRECT [[Pentax DA lens series]]
--- hit Save Page at the bottom of the screen. Voila, the double redirect has been fixed.
--- repeat procedure for each double redirect.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-19-2011, 08:05 PM
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So, some people have started creating duplicate pages on topics that were already in existence. Right now, I am going to list the duplicates, and try to describe the situation. If we can have a discussion that leads to a cohesive strategy to deal with this stuff that would be great.
1. I created separate pages for
-- Pentax DA lens series
-- Pentax DA* lens series
-- Pentax DA Limited lens series
Someone else has subsequently created a new page "Pentax DA Series", which includes all of the above lenses on one page.
The first obvious question is, should all the DA lenses be listed as one series... Currently the Pentax website lists these as three different series (the DA series, the DA* series, and the DA Limited series).
2. I created a page "Pentax FA Lens series", which noted that it was inclusive of the FA Limited Lens series (again following the organization on Pentax's website, and a separate listing for the "Pentax FA Limited lens series", which again noted that this was technically part of the broader category of the FA lens series. Subsequently someone created a page "FA Lens series", which includes all of the above.
3. I created a page named "Pentax digital SLR cameras", with a partial list (7 at this time) of such. Subsequent to that, someone has created another page, "Pentax DSLR models", which lists 4 DSLRs.
Related to this note, should the DSLR's be called "cameras" "models" or "bodies" in the page title? Should the title be for "digital SLR" or "DSLR"?
4. It hasn't been a problem yet but just to point out, the page for the D FA lens series currently includes the D FA 645 medium format lenses. This is because Pentax lists them as part of the D FA series on their website, along with the DSLR/35mm D FA lenses. If you think these lenses should not be listed as part of the same series despite Pentax doing so on their website, this would be a good opportunity to speak up.
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-18-2011, 08:28 PM
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Sure, those are important topics. Not just welcome, but necessary. Why don't you start a few pages on such topics that you are knowledgeable on...
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Forum: Pentax DSLR Discussion
02-18-2011, 08:26 PM
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I'm not sure what you are looking at. There is a lenses category, and it is currently broken down into the following subcategories:
Pentax Lenses
prime lenses
zoom lenses
specialty lenses
weather resistant lenses
Category:Lenses - The Pentax Wiki
Any given lens can belong to as many categories as are relevant to that lens. When we add the first such lens, there will also be a category for "third party lenses" (as opposed to "Pentax lenses").
If, for example, you click through to the "Zoom lenses" category, you will see each zoom lens entered so far.
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