At the PhotographyBLOG:-
http://www.photographyblog.com/articles/pentax_k-7_photos_and_video/
(Also with a Video Clip Sample)
A few quick observations of mine:-
1. Exposure accuracy seems to be good and consistent. No serious under or over exposure for various scenes and exposure compensation is not required, almost. Just look at the picture of the white flower, an object that is of a high reflectance, there is only certain level of underexposure but not by very much - it seems that the Matrix metering has already compensated for it somehow, although not totally.
2. It is told that the new WR version kit lens was used. But I am not convinced of the image quality of the photos as far as the lens is concerned. Resolution is not really that high even at the image centre at various focals. Various forms of blur can easily be seen off-centre (not even at extreme corners) and CAs can be seen too. Nonetheless, the tester liked to use the lens near or just wide opened even on a bright day. He just wanted to test how the lens will perform at wide apertures? ;-D
3. It's a mystery to me that they tell the Jpegs are directly from the camera but they post the RAW files too. They shot RAW and converted in-camera? (Edit: Ooops, it should just be the "RAW + Jpeg"!)
4. The quality of the video clip is just so-so. The video image is not that sharp and clear and it seems noisy with kinds of moire patterns too. It may be a Vimeo problem but I do believe if the source is good, even the downsized video picture will not be looking like that. The colours of the video is terrible and the Dynamic Range is rather limited, IMHO. The worst thing is: There is obvious jumpiness when played back. I played that on an Intel E8300 PC (Core 2 Dual 2.83GHz) with a GeForce 9800 GPU Display Card, so it is not anything related to the performance of my PC. I did download the whole video for the first time and then replayed it from the buffer, so it is not the internet connection speed again (and I do have a high speed internet connection, anyway). And, the mic (internal one?) recorded mostly wind sound and even those noisy vehicles could not be heard. So, afterall, what're the sources of the problems? You judge and guess yourself. (Compared to Ned's Video Samples, this one is just like Junk, frankly)
I had no playback issues but I agree with the rest of the video comments
ReplyDeleteThe jumpiness I referred could be "minor" but I do find it to be unpleasant and I don't like it.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the video is nothing like a 30 fps video but just something that with a lower frame rate.
Regarding your 3rd point, can't you shoot JPEG+RAW simultaneously with the K-7? Like most other DSLRs?
ReplyDeleteOf course you can shoot RAW+JPEG, but he wouldn't know, since he hasn't used a Pentax DSLR in the past 5 years or so.
ReplyDelete5 years? How long ago when Pentax made the first digital *ist and first K? (which I had both)
ReplyDeleteRegarding point 2, of course the image quality is not perfect with a 100$ lens at 15 MP. What did you expect?
ReplyDeleteNevertheless this lens is capable of delivering crisp results, e.g. for the garage door.
Vimeo can't play back 30 fps (which they state on their site somewhere), so jerkiness in the video is to be expected. It's also been clumsily resized and heavily compressed. You can't really tell much about the K-7's video quality by this.
ReplyDeleteThe video plays just fine on my PC. I downloaded the original AVI. Things in motion move smooth, but they have blurry edges, kinda. Hard to explain. Played on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz) and GeForce 7950 512MB, 8GB RAM.
ReplyDeleteSorry, add-on to my previous reply. Not blurry like motion blur. Just to make it clear.
ReplyDelete