Pentax’s new Q7 has been styled to look like it was put together by somebody in shop class when told to “make a camera” out of whatever wooden offcuts were laying around the place. It can even be had in 120 different color combos, presumably all hideous.
But the Q7 does add one thing that’s worth noting: A bigger sensor. And judging by how the lenses now match that sensor in terms of 35mm equivalence, it looks like this was the plan all along.
The sensor size of the Q10 is listed as 1/1.7 inch. This is of course meaningless to most of us. It is a measurement used to obfuscate the real size of the sensor by instead measuring the circle the sensor would fit into. Or something. It is also different from the standard used to measure DSLR sensors, which is a straightforward notation of its width and height.
Luckily, they can be compared: I ran the numbers through the excellent tool at sensor-size.com and came up with the following diagonal measurements of the chips:
Pentax Q10: 0.59”
Typical APS-C sensor: 1.19”
That’s double the size on the diagonal, and therefore roughly a zillion times bigger in terms of area. The Q10 then, is still a toy in terms of sensor size.
A shame, as it actually looks alright in other ways (specs lifted from Photography Bay):
- 12.4MP 1/1.7″ Backlit CMOS Sensor
- Fits Pentax Q-Mount Lens System
- 3.0″ 460k-dot LCD with AR Coating
- Full 1080p HD/H.264 Video Recording
- 5 fps Burst Shooting and 1/2000s Shutter
- ISO Sensitivities up to 12800
- In-Camera Sensor-Shift Shake Reduction
- In-Camera RAW Processing
- Micro HDMI Port
- Built-in Pop-up Flash
And note that this is a camera with interchangeable lenses, like Micro Four Thirds cameras (only with a tinier sensor).
I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get executed about these cameras. It’s almost like the PC world – manufacturers keep bumping specs and adding little, pointless features like built-in filters – but nobody is actually making the cameras do anything new for the photographer.
The last thing that really impressed me with its usefulness was Fujifilm’s hybrid viewfinder, which lets you switch between optical and electronic finders at the flick of a lever. Do I waited a few generations and bought a camera that used it. And a few years back Canon put proper pro video into a large-sensor SLR and took over that sector.
Other than that I’m struggling to find anything that isn’t just “feeds and speeds.” And what I see in the Q7 isn’t helping.
Source: Photography Bay
