Just because you don't have a need to work in rabidly changing light
doesn't mean no one does.I'm not saying everyone works the same or has
the same needs,
Now Nikon at the top end supports their "aperture simulator" well at
least one of them. Pentax could make theirs work more easily, they
don't have the issue where a "K" mount lens of the wrong series mounted
on a "K" mount body might actually damage the Lens or Body.
Fuji has developed an entire series of new lenses that have *gasp*
aperture rings, that photographers even new photographers, who have
never shot film, think are the cat's meow, (yes, I chose that particular
superlative for a reason), and find extremely intuitive, something a lot
of us have known for years and never forgot.
It would be relatively trivial for Pentax to support the aperture ring
on all legacy lenses that have one.
However I'm not making a point about any of that. I'm just pointing out
that if you need a whole new lens suite when moving up to a new body,
there is no rational reason to stick with the old system. Rationally
you should pick the system that offers the most cost effective
solution. Unfortunately that's not likely to be Pentax.
It's not that I have no interest in buying new lenses. There are
budgetary issues, and I have a full Pentax K mount range consisting of
K, (and M), A, F and FA lenses from 17mm (Fisheye) to 300mm), with a few
Classic Vivitar Series 1, (and a couple of oddballs that defy
description), mixed in. I bought the best I could at the time. They
were an investment in the best quality I could afford.
Thirty year old lenses are pretty good. If you don't pixel peep but
print out images at 300 DPI you will find that 30 year old lenses hold
up pretty well. I've got a couple of images of a Hawk taken with an
A*300 F4.0 and F 1.7X where the lens and TC pretty much out preform the
sensor, (K20D). That's a 30 year old lens that's pretty much a mount
update of a 35 year old lens design. For all practical purposes, while
the later * 300 lenses may be marginally better, in a 250 DPI or 300 DPI
print, or for that matter reasonable screen resolution, not pixel
peeping, (because God knows at a 400% view), you can find defects in
anything, it's as good as you need.
My final word, (quoted by many, so I don't know who to attribute it to),
"you date cameras. you marry lenses", if I've got to divorce my lenses,
I won't necessarily, in fact probably won't marry back into the same
family. There's only so much of any kind of abuse I can take. I'll look
for a different kind of abuse, at least it will be different.
On 2/4/2015 1:02 PM, Larry Colen wrote:
P.J. Alling wrote:
Kind of old news, they were displayed at CES with the new K-50
replacement, (still to be named). I don't know how much credence you
should put in a web site that lists as related news rumors of a
"cheaper" Pemtax mirrorless camera from 2012!
Really, since Pentax won't offer better aperture ring support for K and
M series lenses, then I don't really see any particular reason to go
full frame. To get the most out of the camera I would have to invest in
a whole new lens kit, Might as well switch to Nikon or Canon, in that
case.
I'm getting a bit tired of the aperture ring simulator bollocks.
Unless I am vastly mistaken, the presence of an aperture ring
simulator does absolutely nothing to the optical path of the lens. The
only functional difference that you would get is whether you have
automatic or manual exposure.
In my experience, for about maybe 5-10% of the photos I take, the
light situation is changing rapidly enough that while I am shooting
action shots, automatic exposure gives me better results than manual.
If all of your photography is sports photography, outdoors, in
changing light, then I can see that having automatic exposure can make
a significant difference.
In other situations, I find that about 30% of the time, automatic
exposure will work well enough that thanks to the exposure latitude of
the sensors, for any but my most critical shots, I wouldn't notice the
difference between automatic and manual exposure. The vast majority of
the time, I find that the metering on my camera is either wonky
enough, or tuned for a different style of photography than mine, and
automatic exposure simply does not work as well as manual. I do find
it slightly reassuring that at least in these cases I'm smarter than a
$20 microprocessor.
You have professed that you have no interest in buying new lenses. In
reality this means that you are not a customer that Ricoh should worry
nearly as much about as the person who will buy $10,000 worth of glass
to go with their $2,000 camera body.
I will argue however, that even in a static setting, with manual
exposure, or bracketing, taking the very best care, you will still not
get as sharp of images with thirty year old lenses as you will with
the best of today's lenses. Optical science and production has not
been static since you bought your lenses. The best of todays lenses
will outperform the best lenses of the manual exposure era. Maybe not
in every condition, but there is a reason for coatings, there is a
reason that they keep improving their coating formulations. Also
computer design allows them to do more to optimize the performance of
their lenses.
I have a simple reason for wanting a full frame body, and that is that
it will effectively give me a whole bunch of new lenses. My 31 goes
from being a standard to a wide. My 50/1.4 goes from being too long
for most indoors work, to about right. My 20/1.8, despite it's flaws,
will become a rather interestingly wide fast lens. In cases where I
currently use my 50/1.4 stopped down a bit, I can use my 77/1.8 with
its magic pixie dust.
Rather than whining about the aperture simulator, it would be a lot
more productive to ask for a pony.
--
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve
immortality through not dying.
-- Woody Allen
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