I've heard it said many times that better Dr/ISO performance is not necessarily a given with such an increase in pixels within the same physical sensor space ?

I sense that good moire control will remain important to many users with critical needs. We're still learning from random examples where it may be a problem. I think its an important option, but clever marketing too. The new system just needs to be tested out to get a feel for its best application.

Its clearly going to be one of the best crop sensor cameras you can buy. There's plenty of interesting new details to pore over. The h.264 video is new I think? Does this mean full hd in a new file format? Am I right that .AVI is more compressed? If so then I guess the bigger files from this k-3 will challenge some users computers. The new recording volume control is a big plus ... I suppose you can monitor it live on the headphones, but I wonder if there's any visual indicator of the level?

Had a quick glance .... What a machine! there's a lot to take in. I think the big surprise is new approach to the aa filter issue .... This has no filter but instead you can activate a kind of as filter simulator which uses subsonic vibrations. That's a new thing isn't it?

That's why I thought it would be useful to break it down a bit technically, to isolate what actually produces those particular special qualities that are valued. If they could be reproduced with current technologies then people could have their bath and keep the baby

So long as you limit it to only what can actually be analyzed and quantified from the images themselves, then in theory it shouldn't matter - but if you mean I had no personal agenda then I guess that does remove some targets for criticism. I never had any intention of getting either of the k5ii models, and I think that was generally understood.

Well, ok, the point has been made many times, but it is a fact, despite all that majority opinion.

When I compared those k5ii images, not one comment on pages and pages over 2 forums ever questioned anything I said on the basis of me not using the cameras themselves.

People keep saying this - I don't know about it because I haven't used any of these older cameras nor looked at comparison examples. But, if these special qualities are not going to be lost forever eventually, then you'd better start to think about some proper analysis of these files.

If whatever makes up this special character cannot be broken down into 'technical' components then there's no chance of understanding it enough to re-create it with current technology.And eventually those cameras will stop working.

Its interesting isn't it that there's a market for software that tries to re-create the 'feel' and character of various 35mm films (negs & slides). These qualities were things that people admired and presumably miss with digital capture now.

But the software designers would have had to do some serious analysis of those films and their output, and drawn up detailed parameters to re-create the correct effect under every possible ISO rating, exposure value and colour combinations.

Maybe the same could be done for older ccd digital cameras - Silver Efex K100d Plugin ?

I don't dispute the differences exist, or doubt that what people see is genuinely better in terms of the 'certain something' that they can see. But a technical approach may be the only way to isolate out and identify what it is that creates this 'certain something' to see if it can be reproduced from files taken with newer cameras.

The old CCD cameras are not going to keep on going indefinately.

Ok, well if you compared camera generated Jpegs, I think it would be fairly impossible to be sure that equal processes had been applied, even if you set up the camera custom image settings the same - because the default alorithims would be different, so for example, '+3 sharpness' on the Kr is not necessarily the same as '+3 sharpness' on the K100d.

Even in a RAW converter, as I found with the K5ii images, saved matadata in the files can have a different effect on the opening state of the shots in the same converter at default values.

But none of this is to disregard your impressions and preferences, certainly not as far as the 'look and feel' of the photos is concerned.

As far as 'sharpness' & 'buzz' goes, then as I have been saying, it is quite difficult to make strong valid generalisations between shots unless the process has been equalised.