We had seen that Olympus thought stopping the race for pixels taking 12 mega-pixels as the maximum really needed by most photographers. But they had satyed more or less isolated… up to now.
FotoMagazin, German monthly photo magazine, tells us the news in its lastest (April) issue: Pentax joins Olympus in the non-race. After Nikon whose Nikon D700 had shown an honorable restraint with its 12 mega-pixels only digital sensor (in 24×36 Full Frame sensor format), here is Gabriele Remmers, Marketing Communication Manager of the Division of Imaging Systems of Pentax Europe, who revels that today it is more important to bring out image quality, low levels of noise and deep details rather than a pixels explosion. End of the show! Let’s start being serious about quality.
I have to say that I fell in love with this Gabriele. In the interview, we can surprise her defending optical viewfinders (as the pentaprism of our SLR cameras) against Electronic View Finders (EVF).
But, for the most entrenched pentax lovers like some of our readers, she may have a surprise in store when she is questionned about the upcoming cameras. Speaking of 35mm Full Frame, she tells us that you will have to be very very patient. There’s nothing on the drawing table, Pentax is stuck with its range of APS-C “small sensor” lenses. No Full Frame before creating (shoudln’t I say “re-creating”) a full range of lenses targetting this sensor format (some extension of the current D-FA and FA ranges). And if you look into mid-size format, Pentax is still thinking about it but with a low priority (nothing to be expected in the short term).
So, what will be the next Pentax K30D? Quite certainly an APS-C SLR camera with a 12 to 15 mega-pixel sensor optimized for image quality, with an optical viewfinder looking through a nice pentaprism.