It was a citation from a photographer who has Pentax and Sony as gear.
Okay, so it's a personal preference for ergonomics. I would agree with him - I don't care for the ergonomics of Sony bodies at all, but again, it's just personal preference.
With the Pentax in your hands, you know you have a reliable working horse that feels solid and well-designed. The Sony maybe even superior in terms of technical options. However, if I should have an expedition through a rainforest or Antarctic, I know which brand to select ...
Well, I shoot Nikon, you know, the brand NASA chose to use for their missions. I'll take them over anyone else when it comes to reliability. But if someone isn't happy with their ergonomics, their lens choices, or the way their designers design their lenses, so bet it - personal preference.
Regarding lens design, there was an area with true gems - and for Pentax some of these lenses are still build - just think of the "three amigos": FA 31, FA 43, FA77.
The new developments are optimized products from computer calculations. They all deliver almost sterile, error free results. However, are they created as true and honest craftsmanship, can we see them as "masterpieces"? Looking at the lenses you can buy:
Yes, Pentax came out with some nice lenses. So did Olympus in the OM series of days, So did Minolta in the SRT-101 days - some of those old Rokkor X from that era were quite nice (the Minolta bodies were horrendously unreliable, so I passed on that system). So did Nikon of course - probably the most famous of the older mounts, and so did even Canon, not to mention the Contax/Zeiss partnership for their film SLR, and probably others I'm forgetting.
As your "computer calculations" comment. Do you honestly think if the designers from the 70's had the software (like Zemax, Code V, or the proprietary systems the big players use), with the ability to iterate design options vastly more than they could in the manual calculation days, that they wouldn't use them? Certainly they would have. Things change. I can't speak for current day Pentax lenses because the brand is totally irrelevant to me. I've not seen a Pentax shooter in the field in TEN years.
But I can speak to Nikon, or Zeiss, and even Sigma to some degree, because I've used a lot of lenses from those makers. Nikon today makes some lenses that are tuned away from "perfection" in some cases to provide better rendering for specific use cases; almost always people. The 50/1.2S, for example, is not quite as sharp at higher resolution frequencies at the 24-70/2.8S, a zoom, is, at, say, F/4, at 8 feet. Why is that? Because the designer, in the inevitable and unavoidable navigation of trade-offs in the process of lens design, even with modern computing power, chose to trade a bit of that off to gain something elsewhere, because he felt the lens would primarily be used for people, whereas the designers of the zoom realized it would likely be an all purpose lens and tuned the design differently - all with the aid of computers. The software is just a tool; no different than a slide rule or the room of "Math Girls" Nikon had who did the ray tracing calculations in the very long ago days. Looking at other brands - the Zeiss 85/1.4 Otus and the 85/1.4 Milvus (both made and probably designed by Cosina) are different - they are pretty similar stopped down, but the Milvus was specifically designed with people and bokeh as the basis for a lot of the design decisions. Both modern day, high performing optics designed with modern era software. I can go on. Sigma with it's art series - the original 35/1.4 Art and 50/1.4 Art rendered differently if one is aware enough to realize it. Both modern era lenses designed with modern era software, yet the designers chose different paths. And so on.
Sure - some designs aren't like that, but to infer that there is no designer-led-input into the design is false. The software is just a tool - it allows for more iterations of the design, as I mentioned earlier, and the big players (probably not Pentax but I don't know - whomever they farm the designs out probably has it though) even have software that models bokeh and OOF transition, which is impressive. So a modern day designer doesn't need the secret notebooks from the master as much as they used to, but they still have input into the design. The computer doesn't make the final decision; it guides the final decision. Nothing wrong with that. (And none of this takes away from the great designers of old like Hirakawa (Pentax) or Wakimoto (Nikon) or the long list of German designers who worked for Leica and Zeiss either)
There was an excellent post by Joseph W. a while back that explained a lot of what's changed, and if I remember it correctly, we have the software that allows for more design flexibility, and we also have better manufacturing capability that allows a design to be manufactured consistently with less variance than was possible in the old days. So we have improvements in the design aspect and in the opto-mechanical aspect. Of course the designers from old days would have utilized these capabilities if they had them. They'd be idiots if they didn't.
As for the look of lenses today: Times change. Resolution is much higher. The demands of digital sensors mean that for those who really want to extract everything the sensor is capable of, *lenses had to be made better*. One thing that also occurs with the higher resolution devices is the *user* has to be up to task - sloppy technique, inferior support system, bad atmosphere, poor post processing, etc, all will matter more now than it did in the days of Kodacolor II and your spotmatic F. Even in the film days, we saw a glimpse of this - I remember when I shot my first roll of Ektar 25 print film, which was much higher resolving than the rest of the color C-41 films of the day. I had to improve *my* technique to really see what the film could do.
So that's really my disagreement with your post. "Honest Photography" isn't a phrase that makes sense, and almost tends to look down upon progress. I really hate absolute statements that aren't true. Modern lenses are not all bad just because they are of this era. No single manufacturer has the exclusive ability to make "the best lenses period" over all other manufacturers in all focal lengths, no matter how much the marketing might lead you to believe. Personal preference is personal preference. If you like the feel of camera B and another guy/girl likes camera C, so what - but let's leave ill defined terms like "honest photography" out of it.
Off my soapbox.
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