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From: "Tom C"
Subject: Re: Photokina observations...
What irks me and makes me NOT so excited about any new Pentax offering
is that the K10D and K20D were released to the public with some, IMO,
serious flaws. Flaws so serious that my K20D is a brick on the shelf
and that I would have a hard time, as others mentioned, consider
giving it, much less sell it to a friend. My biggest gripe was
exposure consistency and pretty much unusable images above 800 ISO. If
I did sell it, it would probably garner 1/5 what I paid for it.
Pentax undoubtedly knew of these issues pre-release. So in the end, I
think Pentax just wanted in my pocket (which I knew anyway). I
haven't owned a K10D, so my words apply to the K20D, and anecdotally
to the K10D.
To be honest, I think I'm getting equal, if not better results from
the Sony Nex5 as I'm getting from the K7.
Tom, everyone who makes anything wants into your pocket. It's people pulling
out their wallets that keep them in business.
Do you think Nikon couldn't have made the D7000 2 years ago? I suspect they
could have, or something very similar anyway, but it was too big a jump over
what they had on the market at the time.
Canon tends to do rather small incremental changes in their lower end
cameras and releases yet another Rebel once a year, this years model having
smaller increases in performance over last years then the difference from
K10 to K20 or K7 to k5.
Like it or not, it's how companies stay afloat.
The K10 was a game changer for Pentax, for the time (and for the company) it
was a large jump over what they had on the market prior to it. IIRC, at the
time the state of the art was another stop (perhaps as much as two stops) of
performance over what was being offered by the competition.
I truly think that the K20 sensor never did perform up to the expectations
that Pentax had for it, we saw a lot of teething problems with the K20 for
the techno wonks to find fault with. The traveling hot pixels (as good a
name for a techno rock band as any) had dpReview using Pentax as a football
to punt all over the internet.
But people bought it and for the most part seemed to make decent pictures,
all it's flaws to the contrary.
Let me ask you a question: If you bought a mid range Dell computer in early
2008 for a thousand dollars, what would you expect to sell it for in late
2010?
We've commoditized cameras the same way we've commoditized every other
portable electronic device. This years model turns last years into fishwrap.
Why wouldn't you get as good a picture from your Sony as the K7? It has the
same megapixel count (or it's really close), it's got the same amount of
real estate in the sensor as the K7, and frankly, it's going to have a
better sensor.
And I suspect that if you discount flare resistance, the Sony lens is
probably as good as the Pentax zooms that are out there in most of the key
parameters.
You would probably get as good a picture from a K-x as you get from a K7
because the way you tend to shoot doesn't push the performance envelope as
hard as the imaging envelope.
Did it ever bother you that a K1000 took as good a Picture as a PZ-1p? Did
you ask yourself what was the point of spending a grand or more on a camera
that didn't take 5 times a better picture?
I read PentaxForums from time to time. You want to see a more snivelling
bunch of airheads than them, you'd have to put 2000 little kids in a room
with a big bowl of candy, and take the bowl away before any of them get to
it. They whine because the K-x has better low light performance than the
K-7, they pillory Pentax because their entry level camera is better than the
top end one. They look at that one performance specification and build
lineal yards of scrolling around what a bunch of idiots Pentax is because in
one specification, Pentax did really well, paying no attention whatsoever to
all the other things that the camera doesn't do as well at.
It like having a whole group of ADHD anal retentives in the same room
griping about how the new caramel Mars bar isn't as nice as the white
chocolate Mars bar because there is goo inside the caramel bar.
Go over to the Canon forums and you will read pissing and moaning because
the 18mp monster isn't producing as sharp a picture as the 15 mp monster
did.
Meanwhile at Nikon, they seem to just quietly go about the business of
taking pictures with their cameras.
It's very refreshing.
I was showing my partner in studio crime the K5 specs the other day.
His comment was how does Pentax manage to come out with these really nice
camera bodies year after year while Nikon takes 4 years to come out with
another crappy camera? (this was his exact words).
Having said that, he really likes his D3X, but it's coming up on two years
old with no replacement, what the hell is going on over at Nikon?
I suspect that they haven't milked that camera for enough money yet and so
are going to leave it for another year, holding back on a new flagship until
they are pretty sure their user base is hungry enough to buy whatever they
could have released at this years Photokina, and hopefully with enough money
to buy it.
There will never be the perfect product. Companies work with the technology
they have at the time, and they have to put product on the market lest they
appear moribund. This means that sometimes flawed products hit the market.
General Motors is a poster child for this sort of crap, and cars are
commoditized even more than cameras. Today's 60k car is worth perhaps 15k in
less than 5 years as a rule, but we accept this as SOP.
When a camera company comes out with a perfect camera, they will shortly
thereafter go out of business since there will be nothing left for them to
do and their users will abandon them in droves buying flawed cameras from a
different company simply because the flawed camera is better than last
year's flawed camera and the users of the perfect camera will feel betrayed
because somehow the company hasn't managed to improve on their perfection.
William Robb
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