I was shocked that Pentax raw and noise control looks terrible in DPReview. I have never looked at Pentax review all these while but with the release of K-x caught my interest.
I may have to reconsider again.
have to ask the person that take the pictures for the review.This noise issue is a two sided thing that people always bring up in reviews of Pentax DSLRs. To put it simply, the Pentax NR algorithm tries to retain as much details as possible in the image, but this inevitably lead to less noise being removed. If you look carefully at the pictures, you should be able to tell that the Pentax pics look noisier, but the other brands' pics have the fine structures all smudged out. Which evil you prefer, it's up to you.... Or you could just shoot in raw and not have to worry about any of this since in raw all the cameras are more or less on par.
I'm more surprised that the K20D seem to have better IQ overall in this review compared to the K7, any comments from the K7 users so far?
I was shocked that Pentax raw and noise control looks terrible in DPReview. I have never looked at Pentax review all these while but with the release of K-x caught my interest.
I may have to reconsider again.
As to their claim of narrow DR, it's misleading as the values did not factor in "highlight correction" when comparing DR with the competition. By skimming through the DR comparisons, it would seem the K7 is gimped.
It did feature the dynamic range increase with highlight correction turned on in a separate table "Expanded Dynamic Range Function", but they still compared DR using default "off" setting.
This noise issue is a two sided thing that people always bring up in reviews of Pentax DSLRs. To put it simply, the Pentax NR algorithm tries to retain as much details as possible in the image, but this inevitably lead to less noise being removed. If you look carefully at the pictures, you should be able to tell that the Pentax pics look noisier, but the other brands' pics have the fine structures all smudged out. Which evil you prefer, it's up to you.... Or you could just shoot in raw and not have to worry about any of this since in raw all the cameras are more or less on par.
I'm more surprised that the K20D seem to have better IQ overall in this review compared to the K7, any comments from the K7 users so far?
As I've already mentioned in my previous post and as all 'good pentaxians' will know.
Pentax opts for lower NR to preserve details. Look at the pictures yourself. Do you want less noise but loss in details as the pictures become a smudge? With Pentax's approach, you can always do NR to your liking during PP (even my free Paint.Net has the function). For the latter, well... you just can't recover the lost details.
Don't forget that you are not viewing your picts at 100% crops either.
the 2 pictures give me the impression that the underexposure is a major reason for the noise above anything else :dunno:
I understand what you mean, just that was suprise to see such situation arise in jpeg from a bayer's dslr. I only see this in Sigma camera.
From the dpreview gallery I would give it at iso800 max (no more).
http://a.img-dpreview.com/gallery/pentaxk7_samples/originals/imgp0483.jpg
http://a.img-dpreview.com/gallery/pentaxk7_samples/originals/imgp1049.jpg
By my low standards, ISO1600 is certainly usable. Taken at a recent Getai. I had no fast Tele lens. The DA 55-300 was at f5.8 on the long end. I had to fall back on the K7's ISO1600 or go home empty handed.
ISO1600 -No NR-No PP
----------------------
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2627/3976638941_3afc642f21_o.jpg[/img]
ISO1600 -Basic NR using Paint.net-No PP
---------------------------------------
NR adjusted to remove most of the noise from the background canvas.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3487/3977402996_192740093d_o.jpg[/img]
i am not sure if the expand dr function actually adds dr
or just corrects the picture to look like dr has been added, which you can do with shadow/highlight recovery in photoshop.