Oops, they did it, again ... (Pentax K1ii second worst camera of the year)

kameratfinn wrote:

Holger Bargen wrote:

Pentax K1ii is "K1 with icing" like some users stated here. It has much cleaner RAWs than K1 and for this reason post-processing is much easier and less time consuming.

Have you got an K-1 Mk II, Holger? I made the conversion to Mk II and I just know the statement above is not true. Quite contrary, the IQ of the original was a lot better than the "upgrade", which I dearly regret doing.

No, I still have my old K1.

But a lot of people here on the forum told me that there was an improvement.

My impression of the situation is:

The new version takes away a little resolution but gives better RAWs for postprocessing as you have less noise.

It is nice to have a better foundation for a quick workflow at RAW processing with less noise being amplified and setting borders for processing options.

But if noise is no problem it would be better to have the full resolution.

I would have preferred an option to switch this change of the RAW file generation ON or OFF.

It reminds me of a situation many years ago. I liked the Panasonic FZ30 very much but I decided to wait for the next generation. They made a lot of advertising about this camera (FZ50) with graphs in it telling us that they reduced noise in an impressive way. Then I compared the output of both cameras and detected that they just smeared the content of the pixels into something that looked like a painting. This was not what I liked to see - but this way of noise removal became an approach for many camera brands. I was glad Pentax never did - but now they seem to like this method, too.

Image quality is an important feature of each camera. But my impression is, that Pentax puts a lot of effort into processing of the signal inside the camera. I always see the camera and my computer as one unit processing the photos. Within the computer we have a much more powerful tool for processing of graphical signals and we are not so limited in time like with a camera in the field. For this reason I think they better give us the processing tools for the camera (like Sony does for their PixelShift approach) and use the power of the camera to run the machine to do better AF, faster saving of the files or something like that.

Best regards

Holger