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What I think the Pentax Q needs "to make it"

raist3d

Well-known member
So I decided today to leave my K-5 at home and cover some street life Pride Sunday 2011 San Francisco with just my Panasonic Lumix LX5. Yup, just that. I wanted to get in my head an idea how far up the bar is for the Pentax Q to clear and a few clear things emerged after some real world street life.
This is my opinion but in my view:

- at least one stop higher ISO quality from RAW (not just JPEG) than LX5. This means ISO 400 on LX5 = ISO 800 on Pentax Q

- very high quality glass (for the premium denominated lenses) that are good at controlling flare, chroma aberrations, sharpness corner to corner

- cnet and online photographer mentioned no AA filter. Add that one. This would give a boost in resolution compared to the LX5 maybe in the order to 2-4 more megapixels. I understand the LX5 may use a weak AA filter. If both the lens and the AA filter work on the Pentax Q, that should give a visible boost in quality.

- very fast operational speed. We can ignore autofocus in this for now- just make it really super responsive. In manual focus you press that shutter from no-touch and it should scream fast. Like a DSLR.

- total DR at least half a stop higher than the LX5. 1 more stop would be great, but I think that will be tough.

If Pentax can nail all of these, I can see this as a nice premium camera. Fail to do these and take $50-60 off for each, from the MSRP $800 USD (not the street price). And for every failed point add 20% to fail vs the competitors here.

Shows from the LX5 next post to show what I think this camera needs to do better.
 

raist3d

Well-known member
The standard shot.

I think the LX5 did here rather well. Here's the shot resized to the web and later a 100% PNG lossless crop:



The 100% png crop:

 

raist3d

Well-known member
The wide shot

The LX5 did quite quite well at this size, but we can see at 100% that the lens it has, can't do everything.



Now for a 100% crop, looking at the left side:



The shot starts overall pretty sharp and when you go to the left it starts to blur. Maybe it's an air difference temperature at play to some degree, but I also think it's the lens at this focal/aperture combination.

I would like to think the Pentax Q should be able to handle equal sharpness from left to right, commanding that premium price. Lack of AA filter may increase the resolution for those trees/people in the crowd quite a bit.
 

raist3d

Well-known member
Telephoto shot and bokeh

I think the LX5 did this shot superb with good handling of detail, purple fringing and bokeh (for such a small camera). Also the LX5 does 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, and 16:9 aspect ratios natively with no loss in resolution due to the way they did the sensor and the actual final image crop from it.



100% crop:

 

raist3d

Well-known member
Telephoto, some blooming for LX5.. highlights...

Here's a shot where I would like to think the Pentax Q would improve on. This has a bit of blooming and a bit softer in some areas. I still think the LX5 did reasonably well considering, but I hope the Pentax Q at the lowest ISO at least could deliver a bit of more stunning/eye opener result.



100% crop:



Again, not too horrible for the Panasonic at native Bayer size, but would be nice if those papers were not all completely blown out, some details like hair have a bit more detail due to lack of AA and 12 MP sensor, if transitions from white to darker be more sharp.

I wonder how the Pentax Q would cope with these situations.

- Raist
 
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