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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
12-23-2018, 06:05 PM
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Whether those Sony and Fuji upgrades are in fact really significant would itself be a point of debate. If you made 50 inch prints from the Sony A7ii and the Sony A7iii, would anyone be able to tell the difference? Would anyone be able to tell the difference between the two Fuji cameras in terms of visual perception of large prints? In that case, what makes these upgrades all that significant? Better tracking AF? How many people using these systems need better tracking AF? These systems are missing many of the lenses most needed in high-end action photography. Besides, outside of professional photographers, not many people are photographing things that move fast (partly because most photographers can't afford the lenses required for such photography). So in a sense, these cameras, to the extent that they constitute a "significant" upgrade, merely provide improvements in features that the majority of serious photographers don't need and never will use.
Now you could say that the K-1ii constitutes even less of an upgrade — so much so that Pentax really shouldn't have bothered with it. You can make the same argument against some of the other "minor" upgrades that Pentax has indulged in over the years. But I'm inclined to blame consumers for these upgrades. As consumers, we have false expectations about the steady improvement of technology. There's a tendency to think that, because technology is "always getting better," any camera older than three years is too old and a disgrace to have on the market. But the view that technology is always getting better is a romantic myth propagated by people worship technology as if it's some kind of religion, the holy of holies. But the fact is, the one aspect of camera performance that's important to all users (rather than to just specialist users) is sensor performance, and there's been no significant development in sensor performance in at least eight or nine years. The FF camera which gets the highest ISO score over at DXOmark is the A7iii. The camera with the best ISO score in 2009 (almost ten years ago) is the Nikon D3s. There is about a 14% difference in the ISO score of the D3s and the A7iii. DXOmark claims that any difference in ISO scores under 25% is insignificant. So essentially over the last ten years, we have seen no significant improvement in ISO performance in the top performing cameras. That's something to think about, especially for those who believe we're somehow owed as our birthright a significantly improved camera every three years. That's a false ideal that's been leading the more tech-minded photographers astray for far too long.
Now is it possible that Pentax's accelerator unit has enabled a "significant" improvement in ISO performance (or at least something better than anything else that's come along in quite some time). I'll let others endlessly quibble over that one. All I will note is that dxomark has sedulously avoided testing any of the Pentax cameras (there are now three of them) using this technology.
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