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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
04-01-2020, 08:54 PM
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Well, it needs to have interchangeable lenses. That's implied. MILC = Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera. And yes, the K-01 is a MILC, and so is the whole Pentax Q series. They were perfectly valid entries in that category.
The real problem from my standpoint is that they were MILC but not EVIL: Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens. For some reason Pentax seems highly averse to EVFs. About the same time as the Q and the K-01, Olympus were putting out the OM-D E-M5 and showing the way for the whole rest of the industry (except, seemingly, Pentax!) to follow.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
02-08-2020, 08:56 AM
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After several years, I'm still using my Sony A7 with adapted (vintage, manual focus) film SLR lenses. For those who are pining for the Good Old Days of the K1000, but don't want to actually go back to shooting film, this is about as good as it gets. A real dream camera for me would be a compact full-frame mirrorless camera much like the A7 in form, but with all the Pentax user interface and firmware.
And maybe there's an opening there. I mean, Sony themselves have moved on to bigger and heavier and more complicated and expensive things. So have other companies jumping into the mirrorless market. They're all trying to dazzle us with excess, and that applies as much to lenses now as it does to bodies. Pentax could do the opposite with something relatively small, simple, affordable. Something more pure.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
01-03-2019, 07:09 PM
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I'm not sure it's helpful now to do yet another post-mortem analysis on the K-01, which has been done many times already. From where I sit, it had a long laundry list of relatively minor problems, none of which individually would have been fatal. But they added up. I mean, if some percentage of camera shoppers thought it was overpriced at launch, and some percentage thought it was too big for a mirrorless body, and some percentage didn't like the style, and some percentage didn't like the ergonomics, some percentage had difficulty using it in bright sunlight, and some were put off by the robotic hunting whirring autofocus, then you have to wonder what percentage remain who would be ready and willing to buy.
FWIW, I liked my K-01. It was fun to use, produced excellent images, and did a few cool and unusual things. Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake in selling it, but I just had too many cameras. There were a lot of other good cameras that it had to compete against.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
10-10-2018, 07:17 PM
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I'd love to see the Q series continue, as there are definitely improvements that could be made to it.
However, everybody's been hammering the mantra of "bigger is better" and full-frame mania.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
10-07-2018, 06:13 PM
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That's better than not seeing any indication of what you're getting.
At the car show yesterday I dialed my Sony A7 up to +3 compensation to shoot a cabin interior, then I forgot to zero it afterwards. I fired off several shots of cars before I noticed. Later in Lightroom I was able to easily bring those images back down, highlights and all. The leeway when shooting raw on today's sensors is amazing. The rendering that I get in the EVF may not be perfect, but it keeps me somewhere in the ball park, which is all I need. (Also, I once had the same thing happen with a Pentax KS-2, and I was able to fix very over-exposed images in Lightroom. The main difference is that I had a lot more of them to fix, because it took much longer to notice my settings were wrong!)
Incidentally, I also shot a roll of Ektar through my great old Ricoh XR7 while I was at the show. It has the best pentaprism viewfinder that I have ever seen on any camera. It's huge, bright, and it has the diagonal split-prism and microprism focusing screen. Outdoors in the daylight with a fast lens (50mm F1.7) it's still a joy to use. However… There was also a concert indoors, and the Sony was the only sensible choice for that.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
08-27-2018, 05:14 PM
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None of this matches my experience with the four mirrorless bodies that I have owned thus far.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
08-26-2018, 09:06 AM
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I raised an eyebrow at that, because all my Takumars are already working just fine on my Sony A7. Then I realized… Oh, he probably means screw-drive autofocus won't work on the new system. Haha!
 Quote: To adapt Pentax lenses as a product strategy I think it likely there is some critical mass of modern, electronic-aperture lenses with in-lens focus motors in K-mount that Ricoh Imaging wants in the catalog before they feel a RIcoh MILC would be a viable product, and they have some idea when they will get there. That makes sense, if they want to advance in a methodical and very conservative way, but the practical aspects don't look good. They would have a long list of DSLR lenses to update first, and then it's all still K-mount. Then if they want to move to a new optimized-for-mirrorless mount, that would require starting a whole new lens catalog. And meanwhile, even if they produce all these modernized K-mount lenses, will we collectively rush to buy them and shove our existing lenses to the back of the closet?
It sounds a bit like Kodak executives planning out their methodical, step-by-step transition from film to digital photography over a 15 year period, only to get steamrolled when the market went digital in six months.
---------- Post added 08-26-18 at 11:11 AM ----------
Or else, they could just give us an updated Q (I'd love a Super Q with an EVF!), not to mention that telephoto-macro lens that they had on the roadmap for years (and apparently had a working prototype) but never produced.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-04-2018, 10:11 AM
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Certainly the pentaprism in my K-S2 was very nice, especially outdoors on bright, sunny days when an EVF was at its weakest (and an LCD is even worse). However, there’s something I feel gets overlooked too often in the optical-vs-EVF debate…
When I got my first film SLR, it was a revelation. Every camera I had used before that had an optical viewfinder, but none of them had ever given me a view through the taking lens. There was no more trying to estimate the distance and turn a numbered dial to match my guess. Now I could see exactly what I was doing when I focused it, and I had a split prism aid that was like magic. I had a preview lever for the aperture, so I could see the depth of field (if there's enough light, haha!). If I put a filter on the lens, I could see through the filter. If I zoomed or changed lenses, I could see the exact effect of that, not an approximation with some etched lines. It was fantastic.
Using an EVF is just like that—only more so! Now I see exactly what the sensor sees, and more. I also see a preview of what the JPEG engine is going to do with that image, based on my current settings. I see the exposure. I can see the focal depth, continuously. I see the color rendering. If I'm shooting black and white, I can compose in black and white. If I want to crop to 1:1 or 16:9, I can see that in the EVF too. I also have "magical" focus aids more effective than the old split prism. This is the kind of experience that originally fueled the popularity of 35mm SLRs, but taken to a much higher level. It's the kind of thing we would have killed for back then.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-04-2018, 04:06 AM
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Part of the reason is that larger formats simply have different optical characteristics, and you just can't get digital sensors in those sizes. I'm sure if somebody could invent a 4x5 digital sensor that didn't cost a fortune, it would be well received.
That I have to question. A while back I did an experiment where I made a series of comparison shots between my Sony A7 and my Fuji GW690 III loaded with Kodak Portra 160. To make the story short, the results were visually quite similar, despite the film frame being dimensionally twice the size (and four times the area!) of the digital sensor. The digital photos did suffer some moire and color artifacts that were not apparent in the film photos, but otherwise the differences were subtle. And of course, the Sony is easily superior on all other practical concerns of size, versatility, economics, etc.
uhh… Mirrorless is like nuclear power plants in what way now? Something the world desperately needs but is being held back by unreasoning fear? :p
That, unfortunately, is YouTube SOP for any product. It's not just cameras.
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Forum: Pentax Mirrorless Cameras
05-02-2018, 05:01 PM
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I'm sure you're onto something there. The importance of video just grows and grows. There are lots of still photographers who have added video to their skill set because of the sheer demand.
Also… EVFs offer some legitimate advantages, and a significant portion of photographers actually prefer them. What's really striking to me is that Pentax have dabbled with mirrorless, and they've made plenty of cameras that depend on a LCD for composition (K-01, Q series, MX-1, Ricoh GR) but appear highly allergic to EVFs.
---------- Post added 05-02-18 at 07:07 PM ----------
I wanted to underscore this because, again, we've had the MX-1, the GR, the Q series, the K-01, none of which came with an optical viewfinder. Making a camera without an optical viewfinder doesn't seem to be any sort of taboo or religious issue for Ricoh/Pentax. Where they seem really steadfast is their avoidance of any EVFs.
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