Yes, indeed... and even more so with a crayon


I don't take it personally at all.

In a sense, I can see your point. Sometimes it's fun to attempt something difficult, with antiquated equipment, just for grins.

And there's no doubt at all that if somone practised their MF skills for hour after hour, and achieved some fantastic aircraft shots, it would be impressive.

Equally, the time is coming where we'll just point the video camera in the right general direction, and have the software select the best still frame from it later on, having cropped, sharpened, etc etc.

And we'll say 'nice plane, but so what' - and some of the sparkle that once was photography will have become a historical point of interest.

The oldies will be going, 'ooooo when I were a lad, we had to use Photoshop manually, to do our photo editing, kids these days don't know they're born'.

But the young at heart will be doing even more amazing stuff with whatever there is then.

As Arthur Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I just want to be around to see it.

Well I note your '', so maybe you're not really being serious.

But I don't subscribe to this argument at all, for two reasons:

1. It amounts to an argument for attempting to photograph sports or airshows with a 5x4 plate camera. I mean, why not? They did in the old days, so why not now? And think of the thrill if you got good enough to get some decent results with it - it would be you that did it and not the camera!!

The second reason is *much* more important, so I'll make it bold:

2. Having advanced equipment doesn't take away the need to develop and practise advanced technique.

What it does is allow the very best you can achieve to be better than the very best you can achieve with less advanced equipment.

If you're the sort of person that strives to be good with a pinhole camera if that's all that there is, you're the sort of person that would strive to be good with a D3, or in our world, a K-5 hopefully.

All the pleasure in the achievement will still be there, since you'll always be striving to make the most of whatever equipment you have. It will just be better, all other things being equal, than what someone who doesn't put in the effort will achieve.

I imagine the invention of a whole new AF system (rather than minor tweaks to an existing one) is a very expensive project to undertake, one that in hard times you'd want to put off for as long as possible.

However, this seems a less than worthy excuse in the context of what must have been an enormous investment in bringing the 645D to market.

I've been here for three and a half years now, and my impression of the Pentax community is that historically it's been extremely loyal, and very resistant to the notion that any aspect of the system is seriously inferior to the competition. If the results aren't good enough, "learn a really difficult technique and practise a lot" seems to be the preferred recommendation, rather than "let's harangue Pentax to bloody well sort it out".

I'm sensing a little more in the way of vociferous complaining (a Good Thing IMO) in recent times, but I suspect (in a completely evidence-free way, you understand ), that this community loyalty is a little counterproductive at times.

I'm feeling much the same way, although I'll be waiting at least till the K-5 before I make any decisions.

Which Canon did you get?

I think the bottom one of the flower looks pretty good, even at the small size here. There's obviously lots of detail, but I'm not sure you can be sure it's any better than some of the really good shots you see from time to time especially from K20s (he said, conspicuously hoist with his own petard).

However, none of that is preparation for the jaw-dropping amount of detail that's really there.

Shure, but by the same token you get middle-aged but well-heeled guys spending a fortune on hifi gear, insisting that it's better, even though they can't hear anything at all above 15KHz*, and haven't been able to for the last 20 years!

I'd quite like to see someone post (exif removed!) some really good examples of 645D images without saying what they are, and seeing if the experts here piped up and said 'hey, that looks like it could be medium format'.

For myself, I'm not sure. I wouldn't be silly enough to insist that those more educated than myself can't see subtleties that I can't, but at the same time, a lot of tosh is spoken in these parts, confusing sharpness with contrast, and saturation with colour rendition.

If I had a quid for every time someone had said "oo, nice and sharp", when it clearly isn't, I'd be a lot closer to my K-5.

But yes, wow and double wow. There's no mistaking it with the full size ones.

______
* yes, I know it's not *only* about the high frequencies

I had a look at these, and at some of the comments, and with my cynical hat on, thought to myself... 'yeah yeah, here we go again.... how can anyone tell anything at all from pictures reduced for the browser. '

Then I noticed the reference to full size images, and took a look.

The level of detail is so much more than I would have imagined that to comment seems pointless.

I'm with Smegs...

.. Wow!

I like that second Tucano. Is it heavily cropped? If not, I'd like to see a bigger version.

You could probably pull some more shadow detail out of the underside of the Lancaster, too, which would improve it a lot.

Feel free to stop by sometime soon and see if it's the same on my K10D.

I know, John, hence my ''

None taken, it just made me laugh.

Absolutely. Blank spots - I can truly claim some expertise there


Indeed. My experience is that sharp results are considerably easier when they're flying past, rather than towards or away.

For example, this is dreadful, whereas this isn't.

I got lucky with this, which is better, but there were a lot more duds.