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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-23-2019, 07:19 AM
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I have an Auto Chinon 50mm f/1.9 that I bought off eBay for less than $20. I did a single in October with that lens and I'd bet that in many cases you'd have to look pretty closely, zoomed in, to see significant differences between that and the Fat Fifty. Sure, if you zoom in on the corner of the frame and look for high contrast areas with backlit trees... yes, you could immediately tell. Wide open, yea, not the same. But I think most of the time you'd have to do some investigative pixel peeping to know for sure which lens the photo was taken with.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-22-2019, 12:50 PM
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It would compete more-or-less directly with the K-1, but also the new APS-C flagship. What advantages are there to a 24mpixel FF camera? Low-light, I guess, and faster frame rate. Maybe a little cheaper. it would be more of a sports and action camera. But it would have the disadvantages of a FF camera - less reach with moderately sized/priced lenses. It doesn't really matter if it is $200 cheaper and has better frame rate for action if you need to use a $1700, four-pound 150-450 lens to take pictures of football players and birds. And you're not using it in crop mode, since crop mode would be what, 10 Mpixels?
You could take basically the same or better photos with a $1300 K-3 replacement and a $360 55-300PLM.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-22-2019, 10:37 AM
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There are probably some people (not me) who'd like a camera that just has a shutter speed dial, an aperture ring on the lens, and a switch on the back for 100/400/800 ISO. And the inflation-adjusted cost of an SLR from 1985, which means something like $300-700 dollars. I guess you can get lower spec Canon Rebels for that. Or even a K-70. But as you mention, the very simplistic feature set will make it an ultra-niche product which will almost certainly drive the cost well beyond entry level.
---------- Post added 03-22-19 at 01:40 PM ----------
Or save yourself $600 and 2/3rds of a pound with a KP and those lenses, and you'd have to hold a pixel peeping contest to tell the difference. At least after you'd removed the vignetting of the APS-C lenses on FF in post.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-22-2019, 10:17 AM
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I'm sure someone could get rates of good shots of my kids playing soccer with manual focus glass that you can buy inexpensively. I'm pretty sure that someone isn't me. Maybe it could be over time. But I'd rather go with an APS-C camera and a 55-300 PLM that get me good results now. There is no reasonably priced or sized equivalent of that in Pentax full frame. The closest might be a used copy of the Tamron 70-200.
---------- Post added 03-22-19 at 01:23 PM ----------
I thought about that, too. If I'd won I would have had to spend $400-500 for the 28-105mm because I don't have much in the way of FF glass.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-22-2019, 06:20 AM
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If you're okay with a 15MP crop and APS-C lenses to keep your size and cost in check for things like sports, birds, and wildlife. Otherwise you're looking at massive $1700 lenses as the only FF equivalents of the 55-300s and similar on APS-C.
---------- Post added 03-22-19 at 09:28 AM ----------
I doubt this would be cheap, because it would be extremely low volume. The market would be existing K-mount customers who've been around long enough to have a bunch of older film-era glass and don't really care about action or wildlife, and don't mind a non-integrated user interface with difficult access to any menu-based functions. Since you're balancing a smartphone and your camera for many settings, this really becomes a tripod-dependent camera in a lot of use cases.
To me this seems like an idea only Leica would attempt, and they'd paint a red dot on it and charge $5000 a copy for each of the 800 they'd sell.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-15-2019, 10:19 AM
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Oh, okay. That's less perplexing. Does anyone know a typical markup from shipment price to retail?
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-15-2019, 10:05 AM
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That chart indicates that the average price of an ILC is something like 50000 yen, or 460 dollars. The new, splashy stuff, the mirrorless from Sony, Nikon, Canon, they're all five times that cost. A K-1ii is almost $2k.
You can get a Canon Rebel T6 for $400. To make the math work out to $460 you'd have to sell 30 T6 equivalents for each $2500 body they sell.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-15-2019, 08:43 AM
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Your daughter's choice it that - it's a choice. You can get cars other than SUVs that are very safe. I'm sure your Fiesta is a safe vehicle. Large, heavy vehicles may provide more mass to protect you, but they're also harder to manuever while avoiding trouble. My choice of driving a car is driven by requirements which include being safe, fun, affordable to me, and practical, along with being stylish (at least to me).
---------- Post added 01-15-19 at 10:48 AM ----------
I will completely agree with the camera stores, but I think I have a reasonable sampling of car dealers. I will admit that my more recent experiences with dealers have been better than the ones in the past. When buying my wife's Jeep a few years ago the dealers were generally fine. It's been a while since I've had a dealer (Honda in Crofton, Maryland circa 2004) who took my keys and wouldn't give them back as a negotiating tactic.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-15-2019, 06:19 AM
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I don't know... I have no experience with camera shops. There's literally one store within a five hour drive of my house that sells Pentax. I've never talked to a salesperson about camera gear in my whole life.
My experience with car salesmen is highly dependent on the type of car I'm buying. When I was much younger I went with my Dad to buy a used car for my sister, and it was the whole stereotypical used car salesman run-around where we literally had to get up and leave before they'd honor the price they agreed to over the phone. Couldn't have been slimier. When I bought my Mini Cooper S it was very professional and straightforward, I knew exactly what I wanted and we both knew they didn't really negotiate, so everyone was happy and the service was great. When I bought my (used) Audi from a BMW dealer everything was very professional and it went well. In all cases, except perhaps the Mini, I knew more about the car than the salesman. Often a lot more. I'd guess cameras are similar - if it's a dedicated shop that sells higher-end cameras I'd expect a much higher level of knowledge and service than if you're trying to buy a Canon Rebel from Best Buy. But I don't know that's really the case.
Maybe they know that there are very limited options for most people who want the brick-and-mortar experience so they don't try as hard. Or they've become jaded because they get people coming in just to handle the camera they'll buy on Amazon for 15% less. If they tried harder they'd get that 15%.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-15-2019, 05:38 AM
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I think it's playing out like this:
1. Most people use cellphones for photography.
2. ILC manufacturers go luxury/high-end to cater to the "real" photographers who still want a camera, trying to push $1k buyers to $2k, $3k, $4k+
3. Companies drive more and more people to cell phones because there are fewer and fewer people who can afford a high-end camera
4. Eventually many ILC companies go out of business because there are only so many Leica customers
The camera industry is like if the auto industry decided that they can't compete with (insert something else here... scooters? Trains? It doesn't matter), so they're all going to move to the BMW, Land Rover, Aston Martin model. Only so many people can afford a BMW*, much less an Aston. That's kind of what's happening with domestic US sedans/coupes - few people want what they see as a rental car sedan from companies that made crap in the 1980s and 1990s, so they buy German and Japanese cars. US manufacturers give up and just make pickups and crossovers/SUVs. Tastes will eventually change, SUVs and monster trucks will become My Parents' Stodgy Vehicle and once again US manufacturers will be on the precipice because that's all they make.
* Oohhh... I just came up with a solution to the camera industry's woes. Get banks to approve eight or nine year loans for people with shaky credit to buy cameras, even if they depreciate to 50% of their value in a couple years. That's been a godsend for auto companies.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-14-2019, 11:54 AM
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Is 4K video driving up costs? Go to your favorite electronics megastore and search for 4K video cameras, and there are pages of them for way under $1000.
---------- Post added 01-14-19 at 02:06 PM ----------
At some point good enough is good enough. When you have to be in a professionally constructed anechoic chamber to hear the difference between your stereo and your buddy's it's probably not worth the $8k price difference. Especially when you mostly just listen to the stereo that came with your car. When I rented a K-1 last month it didn't magically turn my photography into something otherworldly, it was somewhat better than my APS-C camera in some kinds of challenging situations.
The high-end audio biz also had the disadvantage of good old hucksterism that the internet usually weeds out today. For the low, low price of $775 you could get a tuned hickory volume knob that reduces resonant responses and dramatically increases audio fidelity! I'm not sure there are many features built into today's ILCs that are just expensive lies.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-14-2019, 08:48 AM
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Are they expecting it to be mostly professionals? My wife and I make a very good living, have a nice house, nice cars, we take excellent vacations... she'd look at me like I had three heads if I suggested that I was going to spend $10k on camera equipment. She looked at me like I had two heads when I told her I spent $400 on a lens.
And then you consider that the $10k system you just bought into is only produces marginally better images than one you could have purchased for $2k. You'd have to look hard with some serious pixel peeping in edge case photos to tell the difference between that Canon kit you described and a used K-3ii with a 16-85 mounted on it you could get for $1k.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-14-2019, 05:46 AM
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Product photographer for high-end boutique cave cricket sales. You have to have photograph the crickets in their normal environment of near darkness to avoid spooking them, and the discerning, tempestuous customers must have ridiculously detailed photos when they're spending $millions on cave crickets. Has to be fast because, well, they're crickets. They move a lot. Quickly. Plus, who the heck wants to be in a dark room full of cave crickets for long?
That could be a thing, right? :)
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-10-2019, 06:23 AM
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It's basically computational photography, on a small scale. I'm hopeful they'll continue to expand this capability. An APS-C or Full Frame camera that has even some of the processing power of a modern cell phone dedicated to frame stacking and similar concepts could be a very powerful tool. Cell phones will never catch ILCs if the ILCs are doing the same things on a much larger scale.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
01-04-2019, 05:33 AM
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Purchase? No, not when I've almost fully transitioned to Linux and FOSS software.
But when I finally figured out how to decently do noise reduction with RawTherapee I remembered a batch of high ISO indoor sports shots I'd taken almost a year ago and went back and tried to improve upon what I'd done with Lightroom 6 and Nik. No, I'm not regularly going back to 2012 or 2015 shots and trying to beat my previous results.
As with many things I assume most other people's mileage does vary compared to mine. Most of the people I know take some kind of photographs with some kind of camera, but I only know of one or two who use any kind of post-processing beyond the app on their smartphone. If 5% of people who use a Lightroom equivalent would go back to re-noise adjust then out of my acquaintenances that makes 10% of a person. :)
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
12-30-2018, 07:53 AM
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Couldn't a very slightly modified version of your post have been made in 1900 and 1970, and 1980, and 1990 and 2000, and 2010? Weren't the kids of 1920 hopelessly pampered with their cellulose films instead of wet plates, and mechanical shutters in lieu of removing and replacing the lens cap? Weren't the kids of 1980 lost without their built in light metering and auto film winding? How could those poor lost souls of 1995 have pressed a single shutter button without autofocus and the one-hour photo finishing booth?
By decrying the supposedly auto-everything culture of today and dismissing "those kids" as fake photographers you've drawn a line in the sand where you're comfortable, and decided anything over that line is the realm of lazy amateurs. I'll guess that in 2030 and 2050 the "real" photographers who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s will be sarcastically dismissive of their own new technologies, too.
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