Hey everyone.
I've had a 645D as my main landscape camera for about a year now and a K-1 for about 6 months. I only had Takumar lenses to use on the K-1 so far since i mainly been using it for Astrophotography
Last week I bought two lenses, a Pentax A 645 35mm F3.5 for the 645D and a Sigma Art 35mm F1.4 for the K-1. Yesterday I decided to do some testing with each camera and their respective lenses. As for most of my camera testing, I headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park to do a side by side comparison.
It was a bright sunny day with almost no clouds, so it wasn't the perfect time for getting great photos, but it did vary enough to have some high contrast, high dynamic range shooting.
Here is what I found out. Both lenses and cameras made EXTREMELY sharp images. Putting the images together and viewing them at 100%, it was hard to say which one was the sharpest. They both obtained extremely high detail images. One thing I noticed right away was the rendering was pretty different for each camera. The 645D images "popped" more right out of the camera. There seemed to be more micro-contrast and the colors were much more vibrant, where the colors on the K-1 were more muted.
Interestingly, the 35mm lenses for each camera, one a medium format sensor, and the other a full frame sensor, had nearly the same coverage. This has to do with the different sensor aspect ratios, where the 645 has a 4:3 aspect ratio where the K-1 has a 3:2 aspect ratio.
These images were all taken with the same settings on each camera. I shot in Aperture Priority mode on each camera. In Light Room, I edited each image using the exact same preset so the images from capturing to editing were treated exactly the same way. I didn't use a tripod as I was hiking above timberline and ~30 lbs. of cameras and lenses was heavy enough.
My personal conclusion is this, though the K-1 files were very nice, I really preferred the 645D files. The 645D treat colors differently. There is a "pop" to the images, especially the highlights, that just isn't there with the K-1. And the micro contrast and small details, making a more 3D effect is more apparent in the 645D files. Saying this, the K-1 is actually much more pleasing to use. The build quality, shutter actuation and speed is a hard thing to look past. Both cameras with their respective lenses weigh just about the same, and take up about the same room in the camera bag, so it will be pretty hard for me to make my mind up when picking one camera for the days hike. The CCD sensor in the 645D will probably win out for most of my landscape shooting though.
Here are the images. You can tell which image is from what camera from their aspect ratio. I wish I could display the full size images as the differences between cameras is much more noticeable when you zoom in.
