camera

What do you guys think

Pete

It's the same in your average camer Club Competition. How could the judge award 10 marks for this and only 9 marks for that?

I wouldn't worry too much about these scores or, very often, the conclusions reached in the text. They are often illogical. Although they are better than the old 1970s PP "blob" system. The more blobs the better....

Yeah. PP has done away with the blob system and has advanced to a much better star system.

10-1 they were scoring on out of the camera JPEGs at default settings.

The Sammy has (so I have heared) more aggressive sharpening etc to produce an image which needs less post processing, while the Pentax focusses on retaining detail for the photographer to bring out as he/she sees fit.

What annoys me is that it is extremely rare for reviewers to realise this

I agree totally,

I posted this in another thread but it bears repeating in this one if you are annoyed by inconsistent reviews:

I've just emailed DP Review with a query. Looking at their test reports of the Nikon D80, the Canon D400, and the Pentax K10D, all were "highly recommended". The slight inconsistency is that the Pentax alone was listed as "Highly recommended (just)", implying that it barely scraped home.

Oddly, the scores came in as follows:
Nikon D80 - 53 points
Pentax K10D - 52 points
Canon D400 - 50.5 points

The Canon was "Highly recommended" without a murmer and the Pentax (with a higher score) only just made it into the same category as its lower scoring rival.

Its premature to say anything more at this stage as I am awaiting an explanation.

As a footnote, DP Review have not replied so far (three days and counting).

I've spent my money on the K10D and I'm really very happy with it.



I'm not bothered about what reviewers and pixel-peepers think, and I don't worry that anyone seeing me with the K10D around my neck may have read a poor review and may think that i made a poor choice.

My choicce, my money, my camera. Me happy!

couldn't agree more, my K10D is the best camera I've ever handled and my *istDL2 is the second best.

What angers me is the apparent injustice towards Pentax. Injustice always angers me, particularly when it may lead someone into a decision they later regret. I know at least 2 people who have DSLRs of another brand (I'll leave you to guess which one ) who regret their choice having seen my Pentax in action. It wasn't even the K10D either, one guy is actually jealous of my DL2 dispite the fact that his 30D is worth 3 times the price. Good, relatively unbiased salesmanship and reviewing would have seen both these people with Pentax DSLRs around their necks and the happier for it.

You are absolutely right. But after thirty years of being a Pentax user I am growing weary of all of the cringing and fawning on the part of some reviewers towards the two dominant marques in minature format photography. Neither of these marques have any presence in medium format - a presence Pentax has had since about 1970, first with the 67 and then the 645.

K10D and GX-10 are obviously 'cloned' from a common source but they are NOT identical either 'in the plastic' or in their software/firmware,....so, it would be quite feasible, or even likely, for the image qualities to differ in various ways.

I have tried asking what the exact relationship and differencies are on several sites including here but either nobody knows or they are not saying......

Whats needed are files from both cameras of the same scene with the same lens,...preferably RAW files.

In my view the whole raison d'etre of GX-10 is a touch strange.

That test would have to be with DNG files, as the Samsung has no PEF option. Perhaps that was the reason for introducing DNG in the first place - it saved having to design a Samsung RAW format.

I think the cameras are basically the same, made by pentax in the same factory, but just finished in adifferent (and sometimes not so different) livery.

The raison d'etre is that Samsung wanted to have a DSLR but had no means of doing it quickly enough themselves. Or they pooled resources and were in the design process from the start...

It would be very interesting to know if they were both actually made in the same factory, be that either a Pentax plant or one working for Samsung...

"....I think the cameras are basically the same, made by pentax in the same factory, but just finished in adifferent (and sometimes not so different) livery..."

The plastic mouldings are NOT interchangeable as their profiles and details are subtly different,.........Is the GX-10 a pilot model for a new 'Samsung' factory....??

DNG has probably been adopted by Pentax because it is an open standard and is far more likely to have support long-term. There are already proprietry RAW formats for which the manufacturer's software no longer exists. There is also an issue with some manufacturers (Nikon for example) who have begun encrypting the white balance data in their RAW format. This might sound trivial, but it is not.
Intellectual property restrictions make it illegal for third party companies (Adobe etc) to decrypt this data, so if Nikon decided at some point to stop supporting that format, its users are stuffed (i.e. you won't be able to open your own photographic files). From what I can gather most manufacturers have been at it to varying degrees. Pentax alone so far has accepted a universal RAW format and should get some recognition for it. As usual, some reviewers give it a quick nod, if that, and then move on to fret and suck their thumbs over the Pentax jpeg algorithm. That said, the K10D does turn in superior resolution (in fact superior everything except file size)in RAW.

"........From what I can gather most manufacturers have been at it to varying degrees..."

........Because they were all jockeying for a grip on the rights to the software, however, this is largely sorted out now as DNG has come out top dog. DNG is/was actually the Adobe version.

If I remember correctly Nikon was forced into a legal contest over its attempts to control it's own version of RAW,....but they lost and were forced to be a bit more considerate of their customers.

Thanks for the update. Current information always helps.