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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
08-07-2016, 11:58 PM
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You might recall there were more than a few people here saying, before its release, that there couldn't be a Pentax FF body in the works because there weren't enough lenses. Consistency's a virtue of sorts.
Plus ça change...
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
08-07-2016, 09:26 PM
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Yes, indeed, it's good to have that part of the story filled in, for those of us who haven't known it before.
The whole operation sounds like what we call "asset stripping". In the 1970s and 80s, some people here got very wealthy doing just that, in the process putting some long-established firms out of business, or at least out of the main game, from which some regions are only just recovering. They would call it "right-sizing" or "making efficient use of capital resources", but I call it a sociopath's excuse for having no commitment to an industry, region or person, other than themselves.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
08-07-2016, 01:08 AM
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I didn't think from the start that his review of the K-1 was the fiasco that some people apparently saw it as. However, I'll reiterate my thought that his criticism of the K-1's AF was in part based on the fact that he'd developed a style of portraiture that arose from the abilities of the gear he uses, in that it involved a dynamic style of posing, and presumably his own movements as well. All that, of course, is nothing new - David Bailey and others were practising that style with film SLRs in the 1960s, all without a hint of auto-focus.
The main action I shoot is ballroom dancing - one of my other hobbies - and I don't find the K-1 has trouble maintaining focus in that. I've promised a friend I'd shoot some of his motorcycle racing some time, so I'll be interested to see how it performs in that sphere, too. Then again, I come from non-AF film shooting, so I don't let the camera do all the work for me, and I think it's pretty clear that the K-1 was in large part aimed at people like me. Given that, the imperative for developing an up-to-date AF system probably wasn't there for the K-1 team. Without doing rigorous testing, though, my impression is that it's noticeably faster than the K-3, which itself was an improvement on bodies that came before, so if your view is based on using models several generations old by now, then you might be forgiven for thinking it's still terrible. It isn't, but I expect the next Pentax flagship APS-C and 35FF bodies to be better again.
And I still don't think the K-1 was a mistake, to any degree.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
08-06-2016, 07:59 AM
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Opinions like this are plentiful on the Internet. You see bloggers regularly giving advice to companies like Apple, or telling them they've failed because a new (or even yet-to-be released) product doesn't do this or that, and most of it is simply click-bait, to get page views for pay by advertisers. Thank heavens the return for that form advertising is falling through the floor.
Nonetheless, if you take the proposition in this particular opinion-piece seriously, for the purposes of discussion, the major assumptions underlying it are that Ricoh isn't planning a challenge to the major players in the professional market segment (as they define it) and that to not have such a camera available now is to miss the boat (for whatever reason – name your favourite: mirrorless, iPhones, video etc).
Both those assumptions may be true, but equally, they may not be true. In the first instance, only Ricoh knows for certain, and they won't be telling until they're good and ready. In the second instance, no one knows with any degree of confidence what will occur in the future, in this segment. In addition, there are only two areas where Pentax APS-C falls behind in the professional market, and those are blazingly-fast AF, and professional support. Specialist optics (like tilt-and-shift) may be a third. It never seems to occur to opinion-writers like these that none of those is essential in many forms of professional work, where the major requirements are reliability and image quality.
As we've just seen, you can buy two APS-C bodies (more, in some instances) for the price of one 35FF body, so back-up is entirely possible on your own resources. And lenses? Well, we've all just been given a lesson in the price of good optics in both systems.
Opinions? Pah! They're like Jimmy Durante jokes ("I've got a million of 'em").
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