In my mind it's difficult to understand the difference between sharpness/unsharpness/detail and noise. It seems to me that an image considered to be sharp, yet with a lot of noise, is in reality not sharp and/or contains less detail because the noise is itself replacing detail that would otherwise be there.
Noisy picture = Yucky picture. Tom C. ----Original Message Follows---- From: Joseph Tainter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: K10D aimed as D200 killer Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 12:09:23 -0800 My comment at end. (Caution: Some of you wll hate it. You may not want to read it.) ----- Remember the reviews of the *istD? It got beaten up because Pentax decided to make soft pictures strait out of the box. I was not part of the list then, but I imagine many talking about this being better because it left the decision to the photographer. As I understand it, it's the same with noise vs. details. Tim Mostly harmless (just plain Norwegian) -----Original Message----- In addition, requiring the the user to do even more in post-processing to try to correct for what could be viewed as a camera short-coming, strikes me as a cop out. I already don't use the *ist D for anything serious over ISO 800. I don't want additional post-processing work, that may or may not correct the situation on an image-by-image basis. Tom C. ----- At dpreview I just found a translation of a interview with Hisashi Tatamiya, who has been leading the K10D project. http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1036&message=20671456 ----- I believe Pentax made the right decision in regard to high ISO noise. Image sharpness is retained, if you can figure out a way to reduce noise in PP without softening the image. But Nikon may have been smarter marketing-wise. Pentax would have been criticized whichever way they went. Popular Photography's review of the D80 praised it for low noise at high ISO, completely forgetting to mention that the D80 achieves this at the cost of soft images. When Pop reviews the K10D, they will complain that it compares poorly to the D80 in high ISO noise. And readers who don't know any better will believe that that is the final word. Reading between the lines of the summary of the interview, Mr. Tatamiya is (it seems to me) saying two things: (1) there will be noise at high ISO and you may not like it, and (2) its your problem. None of this is a surprise. The sensor is known to be noisy at high ISO, and I suspected that Pentax would choose a middle course between Nikon and Sony. I just hope that images will be useable at ISO 800. If they are, I'll be satisfied. But I am not expecting this. Herb Chong contacted me off-list, and suggested something I had not heard before. According to Herb, the rule of thumb for good image quality is two steps above the base ISO. This matches my experience with the D, which is fine at 800, but (to my eye) not at 1600. If this rule of thumb holds for the 10 mp sensor, then ISO 400 will be the point above which we can expect image quality to decline noticeably due to noise. (Actually, the paragraph above assumes that all else is equal--like pixel density. Since the K10D has a higher pixel density, one may expect the loss of an additional step due to inherently higher noise. Combining (1) lower base ISO, and (2) smaller pixel size, the K10D could conceiveably yield noticeable degradation in image quality above ISO 200. But Nikon seems to get good image quality without softening at ISO 400, so I believe we will too.) Joe -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
