The site SonyAlphaRumors is reporting that the expected Pentax full-frame camera, originally shown in prototype at the CP+ trade show this year and expected to ship by the end of 2015 will pack a Sony produced 36MP sensor inside of it. This is the same sensor used by Nikon and the Sony a7R. They are further reporting that the camera will support the ability to combine multiple frames into a single “High Resolution” mode image, something that their K-3II camera is already capable of doing.
This isn’t terribly surprising, Sony makes a majority of the sensors found in cameras that use third-party sensors. Pentax lacks the chip fabrication resources to create their own high-end sensor fabrication facility. We also aren’t terribly surprised to see that the camera might have a high-resolution mode. In fact, we’d be surprised if firmware updates to the A7II and any future updates to the a7 lineup didn’t include this same multi-image high resolution sensor combination ability. It’s a natural way to expand the native sensor capturing abilities without having to shift to massively large resolution sensors, and it uses the image stabilization technology already found inside the cameras.
In fact, we think the A7II already has a firmware version available internally that can generate a pixel-shifted high-resolution image, and that’s what was behind the recent “leak” from Zeiss of an image with a surprisingly large pixel count, which media sources thought was proof of an a7RII, but Zeiss claims was a typo.