360Photography

Announcing the K-1

Here it is – the long awaited full-frame Pentax. The K-1 is a solidly constructed camera that feels good in the hand, and should appeal to many photographers looking to step up from APS-C Pentax DSLRs, as well as those looking to use older K-mount glass on a full-frame format.

The body of the K-1 is constructed of a lightweight magnesium alloy, and has 87 seals around the body. Ricoh claims that the K-1 is dustproof, weather-resistant and cold-resistant.

Big viewfinder

Although most people are likely to buy a full-frame camera because they tend to offer better image quality than smaller sensor models, full frame DSLRs gain an operational benefit as a side effect. The larger mirror needed to cover the larger sensor means that more light is reflected up into the viewfinder, meaning it’s easier for a full-frame DSLR to have a large, bright viewfinder, compared to a smaller-sensor version.

The K-1’s viewfinder offers a ‘near 100%’ field of view at a pretty substantial 0.7x magnification. This isn’t the very largest available but it’s still very large and very bright, and will be a significant step up for any users of APS-C cameras. By way of comparison, the Pentax K-3 II’s 0.95x viewfinder is equivalent to 0.63x once you take crop factor into account.

Tilting cradle LCD

The K-1 features an unusual rear LCD arrangement. The panel itself is attached to a tilting cradle that itself is mounted on four legs that slide along a cross-shaped series of slots. As the legs slide out towards the outer points of this cross, the screen moves outwards from the back of the camera. Because the legs all move independently, the cradle can tilt slightly up/down and left/right, even before the LCD is tilted up or down.

The ribbon cable extending from the back of the camera to the LCD is enclosed in a rubber sleeve, so that the weather sealing extends to the rear screen.

LED lights

On the back of the LCD cradle are four small LED lamps that can be used to shed light on the camera’s rear controls. Ricoh says that compared to backlit buttons, this is a better way of providing illumination while maintaining the weather sealing of the buttons on the back of the camera. You do, of course, have to position the LCD in such a way that it the light from those LEDs reaches the controls.

Another LED sits below the viewfinder hump and lights up the lens mount to make it easier to swap lenses in the dark. Finally, there’s an LED fixed in the camera’s card bay that lights up both the card slots and the socket for remote control connection. The brightness of each of these lamps can be configured independently, so that only the area of illumination you want to operate have any effect when you press the lamp button on the top of the camera.

Multi Function Dial

One of the main areas on which the K-1’s controls differ from the well-liked K-3 series bodies is the addition of the Multi Function Dial. This adds a third command dial to the camera’s rear corner but one whose function can be changed simply by rotating a labelled dial just next to the viewfinder hump.

This means that an already customizable two-dial camera becomes a three dial camera whose behavior can be altered without digging into the camera’s menus. We suspect most people will leave the third dial set to ISO or Exposure Comp, most of the time, but it’s an interesting way of extending the degree of direct control and we’ll be interested to see how it ends up being used.

Autofocus module

The autofocus sensor, which Ricoh is calling SAFOX 12, has been updated. Thirty-three AF sensors, twenty-five of which are cross-type (and centrally located), cover a relatively small portion of the frame. The center point along with those directly above and below can focus down to -3EV, and are also ‘high precision’ (longer baseline), which means that when a F2.8 or faster lens is attached, focusing using these points leads to higher accuracy. This is particularly important when shoot faster primes with this camera: as we’ve seen on other brands’ DSLRs, 36 megapixels have a way of highlighting any slight focus imprecision. We’d expect users to have to do some focus fine-tuning to get the best from the K-1, and Ricoh offers a rudimentary AF microadjustment feature to do just that.

With the current ecosystem of Pentax lenses, we expect autofocus speeds to vary considerably based on lens (with older screw-driven lenses in particular likely to exhibit slower performance), but the good news is that the newest Pentax zoom lenses we’ve tried do appear to have significantly quicker AF motors.

Metering and continuous AF

Ricoh is also claiming a ‘Real-Time Scene Analysis System’ that utilizes the new PRIME IV engine and an 86,000-pixel RGB metering sensor for scene analysis using color, facial information, and movement to aid the camera’s metering and AF systems. Not only does this promise to increase accuracy of metering, it also allows the camera to automatically select the correct AF point to stay on your subject (subject tracking) when using continuous AF.

This isn’t new to Pentax – nor any recent Nikon or Canon DSLR with 3D tracking and iTR, respectively – but we’ve found performance to be lacking in previous bodies like the K-3. A brief play with a pre-production K-1 and the relatively fast-to-focus 15-30mm F2.8 in a non-test environment indicated that the system, while fairly accurate, was slow at tracking subjects across the frame. The AF points do move to stay on a moving subject, but do so sluggishly, which means it’ll be of limited utility with faster moving subjects. The limited AF coverage also means it’s unlikely fast-paced shooters will experience much success shooting this way, possibly falling back to relying on single point AF.

Pixel-shift to sample all colors

The K-1 includes an updated version of the Pixel-Shift Resolution mode introduced on the K-3 II. Like that camera, the K-1 takes four shots, shifting its sensor by one pixel between each shot. This means it captures red, green and blue information at every capture location, resulting in an image with full color information for every output pixel.

The latest implementation tries to cancel-out the effects of subject movement as its shooting the four images. Ricoh tells us not to expect it to cope with major changes, such as a car driving across the frame but that it should cope with leaves moving in the breeze.

As well as the more accurate color capture, the benefit of capturing four frames is that the noise performance is improved (because noise can be averaged-out between the frames). It should also mean higher dynamic range, which theoretically could improve up to 2 EV from sampling four images, possibly putting it in competition with the 645Z’s industry-leading Raw dynamic range.

AA-filter simulation

The K-1 also offers the anti-aliasing filter simulator feature that first appeared on the K-3. This vibrates the sensor during exposure just enough to blur the light across more than one pixel. This removes the risk of high frequency patterns clashing with the camera’s color filter, which otherwise results in false color and spurious patterns (aliases) appearing in images.

The camera offers two intensities of filter simulation and, because the sensor itself doesn’t have a physical AA filter, it can also offer an ‘Off’ mode. As on the K-3 II there’s also a filter bracketing option that lets you shoot consecutive images with different degrees of AA filter effect applied, so that you can use a filtered version of the shot if the unfiltered version exhibits moiré.

Astrotracer

The K-1 includes built-in GPS and an electromagnetic compass, giving it the kind of location awareness that you’d usually only expect from a smartphone. The camera uses this, in conjunction with its image stabilization system, to offer the Astrotracer feature that Pentax developed back in 2011. This uses the GPS to work out where the camera is and hence how much the Earth’s rotation will affect the apparent position of the stars overhead.

The camera can then shift and rotate its sensor during a long exposure to track the relative movement of the stars so that they appear as points, rather than trails, in the resulting image. Since this inevitably blurs static objects in the scene, it is most useful for creating low noise starscapes. Night time landscape photographers will also find this tool useful if they combine images with the Astrotracer on and off, using appropriate masking techniques. (Image courtesy of Pentax)

Lens-lineup: FA lenses

At the time of launch, Ricoh offers approximately 12 FA and DFA full-frame lenses. This list includes five FA primes, including the 31, 43 and 77mm ‘Limited’ series. On top of these there are five D FA zooms: a 15-30mm F2.8, 24-70mm F2.8 and 70-200mm F2.8, along with the newly-announced 28-150mm F3.5-5.6 and the 150-450mm F4.5-5.6. Finally, there are two D FA macro lenses: a 50mm and a 100mm.

In addition to these, the camera includes lens correction data for 14 out-of-production lenses – making clear how important backwards compatibility is to this camera.

Using crop lenses on K-1

The K-1 can, of course, still use the Pentax DA lenses designed for the company’s APS-C cameras. By default the camera will use a 15MP APS-C-sized crop of the sensor if a DA lens is mounted but can be made to use its full sensor region, if you’d prefer. Ricoh has published a list of those lenses (all of which are primes) that will produce relatively useable results in full frame mode, if the aperture is stopped down.

Summary

It should be apparent to anyone that the K-1 is a very impressive-looking camera. While we doubt it’s going to be cutting-edge in every respect when it comes to performance, it offers a very solid looking set of specifications with some very clever and genuinely useful flourishes in a very solid looking body.

That in itself is likely to be enough to satisfy the patient Pentax lens owners who’ve been wanting a camera like this for so long. For those people not already committed to the system, there’s the appeal of the price. $ 1799 is an aggressive price for a camera of this caliber and should help extend its appeal beyond the system’s existing users.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)