reviews and video settings.

I have been watching a few reviews of the Pentax K1 lately, and I get realy wound up how they go on about its poor video option.
Why would you buy a dslr to take videos. They seam to give it a real downer,, go buy a video camera.
You wouldn't buy a city bike to go downhill riding, might be the best city bike in the world, but offroad downhilling it would suck...

rant over.
PS. have stopped watching reviews on you tube now..

That's because the video on the K-1 is very similar to the K-30 and K-01 of 2012.
It's a sub par offering for a 2019 device.


Because of all the same reasons you would buy a DSLR in the first place. Great IQ, great ergonomics, sensible menus, great lens selection, support of the original K mount means access to lots of legacy lenses, sensor stabilisation etc.


Today you can get great video and stills from a single device.
Not everyone is well off enough to buy two different devices, one for each task.
Especially when you compare apples for apples and check out the cost of interchangeable lens video camera bodies, with APS-C sensor and weather sealed bodies etc.

Pentax has not kept up with the industry developments in this particular area at all. Every single manufacturer has improved their video offering significantly, including DSLR manufacturers, so I think the commentary is valid, even if you don't personally use a DSLR for video yourself.

All very good points, but at the end of a review a cannon or a nikon is supeirior because of its video capabilities!
I bought a camera. I'm rich enough to also have a video camera which sits in the bottom of the cupbord because my phone does a better job, so that makes my camera not as goos as it should be..
After all they are camera's with video capabilities..
I personaly wouldn't mind if they dropped the video part and improved frames per second and the slighty glitchy focusing..

Whilst like you Pipinmels I'm not bothered about the video abilities of my DSLR I think richandfleur has made good arguments.
A reviewer has to judge a product against others in the marketplace and if part or all of a camera is below the standard offered by other manufacturers well, that is a negative. How much emphasis a reviewer puts on this aspect well.....

I think you need to look at the fundamentals which is to do with the speed of processors that Pentax uses.
Slow frames per second and slow focussing will depend at least partly on how fast the pixel data is processed.
Faster chip(s) mean faster focussing and more frames per second. This is a benefit for all and would allow for
better video.
My DSLR has many functions that I will probably never use and I guess that's true for many users but it seems that
video ignites a passion like no others. And given the number of video cameramen I now see using Canon DSLRs it
seems likely that their capability has some effect on sales.

I've been working on a project which includes employing a professional film maker to create a short movie. He is using one of the Sony XT mirrorless cameras. I have no interest in movie making at all, but we have to accept that convergence is one of the main technological trends of which the "smart phone" is the prime example.

I'm a filmmaker also.
for low budget and personal work, creative experiments etc I use my own gear.
for bigger productions I use my gear plus I rent anything over and above what I own.
I was a high school yearbook photographer using a Pentax k1000.
I've worked on films and been published in many magazines around the world.
last year I did shots for a film project using a $80,000.00 Red camera rig.
I have used every type of camera in-between.
I recently spent approx $20,000.00 switching from Pentax to Sony Mirrorless.
here's why:
I own three Pentax d-slrs all of them have practically no resale value here in Manitoba Canada
For stills photography there is really NOTHING I can do with the Pentax system that the Sony a7III can't do equally or better (except maybe scientific photos for astrophotography the noise reduction sometimes makes faint or small stars disappear).
but..
I also own some go-pro cameras... almost anything (again there's a physical size difference in the cameras) I shoot with a go-pro the a7III can shoot albeit with some accessories like underwater housing, or a camera rig cage.
I own a drone...
again.. if I rent a bigger drone I can mount an a7III to it.
I have a professional video camera... again... with a cage, external monitor, and a few accessories... anything my pro 4k camcorder can do, the a7III can also do.
I use an iPhone for some shots also again the a7III can do pretty much anything the iPhone can do..
all of the above except the dedicated pro camcorder, goes equally for stills and video.. the Pentax only stills becuase the video specs are unusable really.

in every instance where I can use the sony mirrorless instead of a dedicated camera for the type of shot I'm doing there's usually one or two reasons I might go to the trouble of setting up the a7III over the dedicated camera... and it usually pertains to the need to use specialty lenses or accessories to get a better shot....
my drone doesn't have a power zoom lens for example... the GoPro video quality is limited by the sensor and adding a wider or tele lens adapter might make the video too low quality in low light so for a car action scene at night... the a7III might be the smarter choice to mount to the outside of a car...

now understanding everything I just said... if you could afford only ONE camera system.
and you knew today you might be working on a film set, and tomorrow you might be covering an event and next weekend you might have a wedding... and clients might be asking for video, or stills or both...
what system would you buy?

lastly... if you, like me, had a huge investment in one system, but then found yourself forced to buy into a whole new system becuase one feature, that all the other companies offer pro level specs for, flat out refuses to acknowledge that this feature belongs on a D-slr...

well that $20,000.00 I spent with sony came out of Pentax's pocket, becuase the sale was theirs to lose.
I'd rather have spent that money on Pentax lenses and upgrades to maintain system compatibility than buying thier competitors versions of things I already owned Pentax versions of...

but at least I know with 100% certainty that my sony lenses I buy for the A7III can be used on pro film cameras like the Sony Venice and with adaptors on things like RED and Black Magic designs cameras.

so again... pentax is not only losing sales... they're actually HELPING their competitors by forcing people to switch.

even the Ricoh Theta is losing sales to the Insta360 and go-pro fission/max cameras over video quality.

and oh... I bought two specialty adaptors that let me use ALL my pentax lenses on the a7III and the only thing my Pentax K3 can do that the sony a7III cannot do is... autofocus Pentax lenses becuase there's not enough interest for any third party to make an AF adaptor from Pentax for the sony. but even so, try manually focussing the k3 in low light vs manually focussing a pentax lens on the a7III with evf and focus peaking... so there's still one thing the a7 will win at...

As a hobbyist who only takes stills, and has been going backwards technologically (I've mainly been shooting pinhole camera images on medium format film lately), I'm happy to keep shooting what I have.

BUT, that doesn't mean I disagree with you. Ever since I joined this forum a decade ago, there have been the gloomy nay-sayers, but even I notice the slow speed of new releases over the last couple of years and the statement that mirrorless was a fad was depressing. It reminded me of the music promoter who turned down the Beatles because rock'n'roll boy bands were also a passing fad.

Only time will tell, but even this die-hard Pentax fan is feeling a little nervous about the future.

I have no interest in video and don't take much notice of reviews. If you are seriously into video, I doubt most reviews would be helpful anyway.

I work in an industry where filming is routine, I have yet to see any DSLR or mirrorless camera used by anyone other than students.

There's this ongoing thought that video hampers stills capabilities, as if it's the video capabilities that are limiting the burst speed rate (of a mechanical shutter...) and 'glitchy focusing' of the phase detect AF system, both of which have nothing to do with live view mode.

Using DSLR's for video is nothing new.
It's really not. Pentax cameras have supported video for 10 years now, so Pentax does do video - it's not a stills only brand regardless of what some users would like it to be.

Pentax has offered the same video offering since 2012 (with only the KP getting an increase in bit rate). In late 2019 this looks worse than amateur. It hasn't even kept up in the same race as all the other brands, every single major player has improved.

It's over to each user if this is an issue to them, but I don't think it's unrealistic for reviewers to point this out. As long as Pentax offers the mode, it's capabilities in that mode are going to be evaluated, and as long as Pentax don't improve they're going to be called out for it.

The new camera is likely to be released in 2020 and the environment it's going into is full of very capable devices now, capable in both still and video functions on the same device. That's the commercial reality.

There's always a lot of moaning around features, and soul searching about what it means to be Pentax etc.
We're all Pentax users, and we all have different use cases and therefore different personal requirements.

I don't care that my Pentax has features I wont use, but if they're there they should be good and aligned to others in the market.
I don't use WiFi myself, as I process every file that comes off my Pentax (akin to developing int eh old film days) but I'm fine that others use it and have the expectation that Pentax delivers something decent for them.
Likewise for in camera HDR or any in camera JPG processing options etc.

I'd like to think others could take that stance when some Pentax Users want better video capabilities...

agree and would add the following commentary...
there is no doubt the Sony hybrid AF system performs equal (being very generous here becuase I'm pretty sure it's no contest win for Sony) or better than Pentax's af....
the cpu power and memory buffers that make recording 4k video possible would also equal or improve upon Pentax's current file handling speeds and burst shooting modes. you can't argue that 24, 30 and with some models 60 frames per second at 6 k resolution (sony ff mirrorless record at 6k and downsample to 4k) at high bit rates is less taxing than 10 fps stills burst mode.... so any upgrades to video specs won't take away stills capabilities but would would only provide the hardware to improve the current stills capabilities...
kinda win win for everybody to say "make it better"

You bought a digital imaging device that you personally use for stills only.
It's late 2019. All cameras today can do stills and video, and Pentax itself has had this ability for 10 years.
The reason Pentax is downvoted because of it's video capabilities is because they are very poor compared to every other camera brands capabilities today.
There's really not much more to it than that.

IIRC Pentax was sort of ahead of the game once with the K20D; it was one of the first DSLRs that could sort of do video albeit at only 14 fps...

You bought a digital imaging device that you personally use for stills only.
It's late 2019. All cameras today can do stills and video, and Pentax itself has had this ability for 10 years.
The reason Pentax is downvoted because of it's video capabilities is because they are very poor compared to every other camera brands capabilities today.
There's really not much more to it than that.

Actually there is a lot more to it, not all cameras perform equally well in stills either; if it is video you want then look elsewhere BUT if you want the best rendered landscape shots, astrophotography, buildings and interiors you would be hard pressed to beat the K1. Instead of complaining about Pentax video why not complain about how other manufacturers don't have the features that shifting the sensor brings that are unique to Pentax? The argument is exactly the same. For some reason I have seen several YouTubers recently complaining about how they miss IBIS when they switch from mirrorless to DSLR but as we know the K1 gives the best of both for low light shots. These are the reasons reviews are generally meaningless unless they are targeted at a particular field.