Pentax Life

DPreview forums user Susumu have posted the thorough report from the last week Pentax Talk Live show in Tokyo, Japan.

I asked one of the Pentax staff whether or not firmware ver. 1.0 was used for these samples. He answered No. He said all the samples were from beta firmware and there was no ver. 1.0 firmware yet. I said to him their site said ver. 1.0. He said the site info was perhaps wrong.

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Release dates outside Japan are not fixed. According to them, there is no fixed release dates outside Japan though the release date in Japan is Nov. 30th. I think it probably means release dates outside Japan differ by countries, dealers and retail stores.

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They let us take pictures to print out on 2L size (5� x 7�). I set ISO at 1600 and used a DA70mmF2.4Limited. The printed photo, jpeg straight out of the camera, was beautiful though there was noise. Noise on the shadow was not so conspicuous (I mean the noise was acceptable to me), but depiction of the woman’s hair looked rough to me (it was a portrait shot). Probably it’s because of sharpness-oriented tuning of K10D. (They said they gave priority to sharpness rather than noise reduction.)

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Apart from in-body dust reduction system, they release a very convenient dust-removal tool. It’s like a cotton-tipped swab: the difference is this tool has a urethane rubber instead of cotton. According to the latest issue of _Pentax Family_ (a Japanese Pentax journal), it lets us directly remove sticky dusts on the sensor (to be correct, the low pass filter), and the dusts on the rubber can be removed with adhesive tape.

Also Susumu have posted several photos from the show: 1, 2, 3, 4; printed samples: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 (ISO 1000), 13 (comparison with the other 10 Megapixels DSLR); and the new sensor cleaning kit.