[Warning: long, rambling post ahead] For the longest time, I've been unable to shoot high-ISO or long-exposure photos with my K10D. The reason was noise banding. It was so prevalent in early K10Ds that Pentax released a firmware upgrade to fix it, but in my camera the upgrade only reduced it slightly.
Last month I was posting some photos to my blog. They were underexposed, so I bumped up the exposure in Adobe Camera Raw to compensate, which revealed the damn banding in the darker areas. Aside from the banding, the photos were pretty good, so I tried to clean them up and posted them anyway, with an explanation for the weird noise pattern. Writing that explanation got me really mad, though. I ended up sending a long and probably too-harshly-worded-for-tech-support-guys (who really don't deserve it) email to Pentax about my many frustrations with my K10D (there was more than just the noise that was bugging me). The Tech Support Operations Supervisor wrote back and offered a discount if I sent the camera in for an estimate on repairs, since the camera was well out of warranty. I wasn't really expecting anything like that, nor could I truly afford repairs, but I decided to send the camera in anyway, just to see what would come of it. About a week later I got a call with details about what they would do and for how much. They would replace the sensor and related parts, realign everything (all my photos were always tilted by about one degree, no matter how level the image appeared in the viewfinder), clean up the dust from inside the LCD cover, fix the back-focus problem, etc. They offered to only charge for parts, and since this was a lot cheaper than buying a new camera (or even a used K10D), I decided to go for it. There is now a chunk more debt on my credit card, but I think it's worth it. Anyway, my camera just arrived here at work. Of course, since I thought it was going to be delivered tomorrow, I don't have a battery or anything else to test it with, but I'm super excited to have it back. I felt like I was missing a hand or something while my camera was gone. I can't wait to see how the new sensor performs. I'm not expecting massive improvement, but as long as there is no banding I'll be happy. I'm going to try to put it to the test some time this week. I'll post my results when I can. John -- http://www.jacelio.com http://www.cafepress.com/jacelio -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
