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Comment by andjd | Hacker News Reader

I agree that owning the DSLR niche is a good strategy for Pentax. Ricoh hasn't given them the budget to make digital autofocus systems that are competitive with the other big brands, and it's likely hard to justify doing so with their market share.

There's an interesting world where Ricoh sells Pentax to Samsung or Apple or Google. Taking cutting edge computational photography from smartphones and applying it to a full-size camera with the sensors and optics to match could be really compelling. Pentax has good brand value and the optical expertise to make this credible to photographers, and there'd be growth potential in just taking market share from other players.

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Maybe there is a market for smartphone filters in full blown DSLRs. Maybe not. I for sure want my DSLRs to give me a clean RAW file if I want it. And my phone, too. Which my Pixel does.

Sure. But isn't "computational photography" also all the "smarts" around taking the picture?

Like subject detection for focus tracking. Or trying to "understand" the scene and figure that since the subject moves, it's better to up the ISO and the shutter speed because the stabilizer won't help you. Or figure that some 300-year-old building won't start moving just as you take the picture, so it can do the reverse and take advantage of the stabilizer.

Auto-exposure exists since the 90 in SLRs, auto-ISO since the first DSLRs. The result is still a normal photo, either on undeveloped film or, if you want so, a RAW file.

Kind of the same goes for Auto-Focus with subject and face recognition and such. Still, the result is, ideally, well exposed and focused picture.

Computational photography is everything the camera does between the RAW image data (which is itself already processed sensor data) and the JPEG it creates. Thisbis as well as old as the first DSLRs, and such far from all the post-processing e.g. smart phones do. And the latter so, well, I am not sure how much it has to do with photography when information coming from sources other than the RAW data is used. Or when a ton of filters, auto-pseudo-HDR and focus stacking is automatically applied.

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