On 2006-06-19 09:13, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > It is the job of engineers at Pentax to constantly improve the image > quality of the cameras they produce. Not all of these improvements > are *possible* to do to older bodies, even if it were cost effective > to do so. Even if there are substantial image quality gains to be had > in JPEG rendering, much of the algorithm used is embedded into the > hardware of the graphics rendering chip in a digital camera for both > speed and cost reasons.
Hi Godfrey, thanks for the comment. But do you have any insight, which of this does apply to K100D vs. *istD? - is the image quality better? Pentax says yes. - is the sensor identical? Pentax says yes. - is there any relevant different hardware? Pentax does not state this clearly. I'd expect certain improvements, although I don't know whether these differences will absolutely prevent a firmware improvement for old hardware, whether they are required for image quality or whether they focus on other limitations. - is it a firmware difference? Pentax says yes. > There is no reason to assume that a firmware upgrade can change the > rendering algorithm beyond a certain point. That's a reasonable argumentation. But it does lack the proof. On the other hand, we got an 'official' document. My interpretation is kind of worst case, which may be far beyond the goal of this interview. But for dicussion, I feel that it's a reasonable assumption to guess that what they write is actually true. > Pentax has done what an > excellent job of providing useful improvements with firmware > revisions to the *ist D_ series cameras, and is supporting the > existing user base very well. They have done significant improvements. I'm not that much into the details to know whether they did enough improvements (people are happy with image quality? reasonable balance between jpg quality, speed and size, compared to picture quality from RAW processing to other jpg? Small RAW sizes by now?). But I know many products which could be (almost) as good as others, as long as they were not crippled by software limitations. For example, I got an MP3 player recently (iRiver U10 2GB UMS). There's a new player around by now with better startup and better navigation (iRiver clix, although much cheaper). I know that it got an upgraded CPU, compared to the first 512 MB and 1 GB models. But I doubt that the improvements could not be ported to the former U10. On the other hand the company provided a surprising update to convert between MTP and UMS software - former models for the US market where crippled to the MTP version. Now bad omens claim that this is a final move since iRiver might leave this market, so they don't mind about decreasing Win friendliness. If you know better about the questions above, please let me know. - Martin -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
