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Possible new K1 firmware 1.4 coming

Paul2660

Well-known member
Firmware 1.4 is now official.

Great to see Pentax realized that the white dot problem was significant.

Paul C
 

Paul2660

Well-known member
After a bit of reading, it's apparent that two things are not evident:

1. The Pentax K1 shares the exact same problem the early Nikon D810's had (and D800e), in that with longer exposures with LENR off, you will gain thousands to millions of white dots. This issue has been clearly documented by Nikon.

2. That the fix for the K1 can't be controlled by firmware only, as the "white dot fix" with firmware 1.4 only applies to jpg output.

For me, a K1 owner, this is bad news.

Astro photography, either study of the milky way or star trail work greatly benefits from raw capture as the mailability of the raw files is just so much great than a jpg. Pentax must not understand this, as they have not made a formal recall of early K1 cameras, instead they only released this firmware which solves the problem for jpg output (worthless for me).

I find this issue a bit unacceptable and unfortunate. Pentax added several excellent features with the K1, which were designed for astro photography. Astro photograph more often than not requires longer exposures. Using LENR during such photographic sessions is also a total waste as you use up your battery 2x faster and get 1/2 of the images since the Pentax (just like Nikon) blocks you out for the same amount of time as the previous exposure. Even for Milky Way work, having to wait an extra 2.5 minutes or 3 minutes is excessive.

Pentax has not made any formal recall of early K1 bodies. They don't have a US service center, instead use Precision Camera. I have not used them for anything, but don't really have much faith that they could fix this with a calibration process. Several Eurpoean photographers have sent their K1 cameras into other non Pentax service centers for a fix and have had mixed results. Some cameras seemingly fixed other made worse.

Overall it's a most unfortunate situation and a early beta testing process should have caught this problem and if the best answer Pentax had was use LENR, then that is just not a correct response for anyone considering Astro photography with a modern DSLR. It also shows that Pentax has a total lack of knowledge of the requirements for astro work and or they did not engage with any astro photographers, or both.

Thank Goodness that Phase One has support for the K1 and that their "single pixel noise reduction" can resolve most of the problems as long as the images were captured as raw files.

Paul C
 
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