Hi gang ... A few days ago John and I got together and made a few pics with his istD.
I had time to look at them in PS, and compare them to pics of the same subjects made from a little Sony P&S. John, the JPEGs from the istD that I have here are the WORST! I have ever encountered. There are so many artifacts in your beard and on your face, the pics almost look like a mosaic (The pics we took at the Thai restaurant with the K18/3.5), while essentially the same shot, made with the Sony, shows no artifacts. The results of the house we photographed on Blossom Ave are much poorer with the Pentax. The big antenna on the roof shows a definite color shift to blue-green, there's what appears to be a fair amount of CA around the chimney, and the roof tiles are way too contrasty and sharp-edged where they meet the sky. Essentially the same pic made with the Sony an hour or two earlier shows none of those problems, although there is a small amount of CA in one high contrast situation. If I were judging the istD based only on those pics, I'd never even consider it. But, there has to be more to the matter. As noted here, software provided by Pentax to convert RAW files may be suspect. If so, the value of in camera RAW is substantially lessened. Frankly, I think RAW is just a bunch of hooey! Conversion programs provide widely varying results; some programs that come with the cameras are acknowledged to be mediocre, at best. So, while there's all sorts of technical reasons why RAW is better, if those technical reasons can't be easily implemented, then give me a big ol' TIFF anytime, especially if the results from my $400.00 Sony (not even one of the "big" brands) makes the istD (and, to be fair, results I've compared to Canon 300D and 10D) are superior and are obtained with less fuss and commotion. Try some TIFFs with the Pentax, and see if there's an improvement of image quality. OK, back to retirement for me ... Shel Belinkoff > So, if anything, Photo Laboratory can do a better job than in-camera. > (Not surprising; it has rather more resources to apply to the problem). > That definitely seems to tilt the balance further towards RAW mode :-( > > The RAW colour fringing noted in the dpreview.com comparison is slightly > worrying. I wonder if this is also present in in-camera images, but is > being masked by JPEG compression? This is exactly the sort of detail that > can be lost during JPEG processing. > > It's time to look at a few in-camera TIFF images, I guess.
