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minneapolitan
3
Apr 7, 2017
Just Nikanon as options huh? There are things cankon do really well .. but landscapes ...? Pentax, dawg.
image quality? For slow moving work like landscape photography - you would be hard pressed to beat the Pentax K1 without spending 5-10x as much money. If you're not familiar - their sensor isn't fixed, it's suspended by tiny motors, which form its image stabilization system.
Advantage one: any lens new or old is image stabilized. The k-mount has had revisions, but almost every k mount lens ever made is compatible, and even 42mm screw mount lenses on adapters. Pentax has always put an emphasis on backwards compatibility over the years, and pretty much never obsoleted an entire generation of lenses for profit... Look at how many variations of mounts canon and Nikon have had, and how many of them their current-gen digitals are compatible with..
The sensor stabilization is rated to 5 stops in the k1. But the fact the sensor moves opens up a bunch of additional possibilities. Astrotracer uses well calibrated gps and compass to spin the sensor at the same rate as the stars - eliminating star trails in pictures up to almost 300sec / 5 minutes on wide lenses / in the 16-18mm range. The normal rule of thumb to avoid star trails? 500/focal length... 500/20mm = 25 seconds. Just google or Flickr search for examples..
The other thing you can do is use it as a basic / small movement adjustable view camera. You can move the sensor freely to frame a subject in studio, but you can also make some minor parallax corrections in the field too.. not that that's useful for landscapes.... ;)
But the coup d'état is pixel shift, where the camera takes four pics in row, shifting the sensor one pixel in four directions, and then blending into one image, primarily boosting fine detail and shadow detail in landscape or other still image.. it doesn't do well with foliage being blown around or moving Subjects, and you need to be on a tripod to use it. Again just google the results. The feature is on their FF K1 and their aps-c models as well..
Oh various testing labs also point out that the single-image raw files have some of the highest dynamic range they've ever seen, and pixel shift effectively gives the camera a 2EV DR boost, making it directly competitive with medium format camera systems costing orders of magnitude more, in terms of image quality and DR alone.
Their sensor and the software they've written to interact with it - both from the above features and the general use are stellar - this is a serious camera made for serious still photographers.
It kinda sucks at sports... the autofocus is comparatively slow, and basic. It's not a good choice for shooting video... It is kinda Chunky. They did go with two sd slots, the wifi/ app is marginal, the menus aren't terribly refined, but still photography - landscape, portraiture, studio / product / stills work, architectural, etc are its forte.
And I fu*****g love my K1. As a guy in one of the end of year gear wrap-ups said - it makes it fun to shoot still photos again.