Not happy with my low light, no flash, indoor shots...

[Marc Sabatella]

Thanks for the reply and the pix - it is great. The K200d is a lot clearer and resolves better than the k10 - published test images of the same subject show the difference in some testing site I looked at about 2 years ago - so much so that i considered getting a K200 for a while to replace my disappointing GX10.

Not having a K10D or GX10 or having shot side-by-side with one in these conditions, I can't say how this works out in practice. I can just say that when I've downloaded RAW files myself fro varous camera shot under the same conditions, I didn't see that much difference between the K10D and K200D. I think the half a stop beyond 3200 I shot more than accounts for this.

Your picture is good on its own merits and I guess a print will blur out the horizontal banding that marches across the background.

I don't really see horizontal banding per se, but I also was not really looking at the background (your monitor may be turned up brighter than mine too). In any case, had I noticed it, I simply would have been slightly more aggressive with NR and/or pulled the background a bit darker.

But a KX will do it a lot better, enough I believe to put it into a different class to the K10.

"Different class" is pretty subjective and hard to argue with. I'm just trying to put this all back into perspective - the extent to which bad images can be blamed on the camera or the photographer. Whether or not the K-x can do somewhat better, the point remains that if one isn't consistently getting results at least this good, there are factors other than camera at work.

I saw a 12800 iso pix from the KX the other day on a site ( I think a competitor to this one) that looked as good as your 3200 iso shot from the K200 - that's a 2 stop difference if I'm calculating correctly.

First of all, since my shot was half a stop beyond 3200, that would be a stop and half over the K200D (albeit 2 stops over the K10D if we believe there is as much as half stop difference between K10D and K200D, which I don't). But I'd also question whether the 12800 image from the K-x was really as good (was it displayed as large? did you compare them side by side? would it have still looked as good blown up a bit larger?). I'd also question whether it benefited from heavy duty processing a la Topaz Denoise, which mine did not.

I am skeprical because I've looked at a number of ISO 12800 images fro the K-x, and while impressive for what they are, none of the ones I've seen really come close to my ISO 3200, and I don't even have to compare at 100% to see this. Now, ISo 6400 is another matter - I've looked at both JPEG and RAW images from the K-x at 6400, compared them directly to mine, and found that the best ISO 6400 images look only a little worse than my best ISO 3200, with the average and worst cases similarly showing maybe just under a stop difference in this way. This includes some shots taken side by side in the same location, although not the same exact shot, and they're not my K-x images., so I'd rather not post the comparison directly.

But indeed, there is no denying that in the rare cases where it is necessary to go beyond ISO 3200 to get a shot, the K-x pulls ahead by a larger margin. My point is that this is not going to be the difference between success and failure most of the time. Most of these shots are successfully taken at ISO 1600-3200, where the any of these cameras should give you decent results - again, with proper technique.

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Marc Sabatella
http://www.marcsabatella.com/
Blog: http://marcsabatella.blogspot.com/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcsabatella/

 

[Russ Houston]

You've gotten some good advice on how to tweak your K10D and get the most out of it, and the shots you've posted are pretty close already. So, you could probably wring a litte more out of your body with careful technique and post processing. Mark Sabatella has some great tips and he really gets the most out of his K200D.

However, I had the K10D and moved on to the K20D in short order precisely because of the poor high ISO/low light performance. To me, the 10mp Sony CCD was a few mp's too many. The 6mp CCD in the *ist and K100 series was great. The K10D sensor, not so great. Then the K20D CMOS sensor picked back up where the 6mp CCD left off. It's easy to buy more gear. This might be a case where the Kx (or even a cheap K20D if you can find one) is justified. If you can find the K20D still out there (maybe gently used?), it shares the same batteries and grip as the K10D, and the ergonomics are basically the same.

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Russ
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rfortson/
http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/russfortson
Even bad photography can be fun