Pentax K-1 review: Pixel Shift Resolution system

The camera’s default Bright colour option delivers pleasingly saturated colours

First seen in the K-3 II, Pentax’s Pixel Shift Resolution feature attempts to rectify false colour, a lack of critical detail and other ill effects associated with the process of demosaicing. This is required for any images captured using a camera that employs a colour filter array – present in the K-1 and the vast majority of other cameras – where full RGB colour information of a pixel is partly determined by the values of neighbouring pixels.

The Pixel Shift Resolution option uses the camera’s Shake Reduction system to capture four separate images of the scene, with a one-pixel displacement between each image, before merging them into a single image. This allows for full RGB colour information at each pixel without the guesswork of the demosaicing process, which theoretically means that images should represent the conditions captured more faithfully.

With four images captured in quick succession, this feature is clearly best suited to scenes of static subjects captured with the aid of a tripod. For the K-1, however, this has been augmented with Motion Correction, which notices if a subject moves between frames and takes this into account when processing the result.