The Pentax K1, has gotten some good and bad press lately, but one review on Dpreview over a month ago really started a negative chain reaction. This review has since been corrected, but as with many things, first impressions tend to be the most important.

I wanted to attach 3 images, from a test I was working on yesterday. Good lighting, and a bit of wind. The wind was not consistent and tended to hit different parts of my scene with more or less force. What is so impressive to me is just how bad the LR conversion is vs the one from Silkypix. If all you have is LR or ACR for the K1, you really need to look to Silkypix for now. I have no faith that Adobe will attempt to revisit their current conversion for Pixel Shift on the K1, and I base this on the fact that Adobe never has fixed their less than stellar conversion for the Fuji X-trans files. The problems with that conversion have been known about now for over 2 years.

There are three images attached, the first two are Silkypix conversions on image 724 and a follow on image 725. The third image is LR’s conversion of the same file. The point being that if you are only using LR for Pixel shift raw conversions, you are more than likely missing a lot. The LR image is totally blurred and basically worthless, where as the exact same raw file from Silkypix is very good, in fact amazing, when compare the two conversions. The other Silkypix conversion is from the next shot, 725. I included this to show how the shadow area to the left of center improves considerably. Both conversions have a bit of trouble on the same part of the file in image 724, however more than likely the Silkypix conversion of 724 would hold up.

These conversions were done only for the effect to show the differences in blur recovery. By default I feel Silkypix has too much sharpening applied and a bit too my saturation. But a small price to pay for recovery of the image. You can also see in first two files that the part of the tree just to the left of center, in the shade, is still having trouble, even with Silkypix, as it’s blurred. However I took several test files and in the very next frame you can see much more detail in this same part of the image.

So for now, if you are using pixel shift or testing it, outdoors make sure you work with Silkypix Developer’s Studio. You can download the software for a 30 free trial and it’s not inexpensive at $295.00. It’s a issue to take into consideration if you are looking at the K1 as the extra cost of this software takes the K1 into the $2,100.00 range. Still a margin compared to other cameras in this class.

I would like to see Pentax step and address this software issue, by at least giving a coupon or discount towards the full Silkypix software, as their version which ships with the camera might as well just be left out of the box.

Paul C