GX10 Lower iso1600 noise

[jamesm007]

I will post this info here as not to offend and because it is bragging, no matter how you slice it.

I read in a pro review (dslr user magazine Feb 2007) a review comparing the GX10 and K10, the tests showed the GX10 as having less luminance noise over iso800 over the K10; however it also showed the Pentax having a little lower noise up to iso800. I really did not care or put much into it. Well today for the first time I used the Imaging-Resource Comparometer and looked at the pics at iso1600 from the K10 and GX10 and could clearly see what they where taking about, the colors are much cleaner with the GX10 at iso1600. So I put both full files through Noise Ninja to measure the noise and sure enough the GX10 noise index is 36 (15 Lum, 20 Chroma) and the K10s index is 44 (20 Lum, 24 Chroma) and measuring files at iso800 and iso400 shows the Pentax has lower luminance but only 1 point and the overall noise levels are just a bit lower with the Samsung all the way from iso400-iso1600 I did not measure lower. Overall the Samsung is cleaner, whats the big deal...

The Samsung GX10 and Pentax K10 are slightly different inside as well as outside. I believed them to be the same, how did Samsung get lower noise? I don't know the detail looks the same. Some say the Samsung GX10 does not suffer the soft jpegs issue, this I have not proven, so far the sharpening and jpeg quality seems the same.

No one ever writes about this very obvious difference, I guess the Pentax fans far outnumber the Samsung, I would buy a Pentax K20 in one second over the Samsung just because of the lower price and really I think of them both GX10 and K10 to be the same, the difference is minor. But... I must say the GX10 does have a much nicer iso1600 file in 'jpeg'.

So for what ever its worth, to who ever its worth anything if it is worth anything, there is a lot of evidence that says the GX10 has internally different firmware and has lower iso1600 noise over the Pentax.

[mithrandir]

It seems that Samsung engineers opted for fine tuning in the High ISO-Low Noise arena with the GX10. Pentax engineers opted for the same with the K200D. There is more to picture quality than High ISO-Low Noise however as you will note in the DXO sensor rankings (Camera rankings). They haven't rated the GX10 yet but you will note that the GX20 is rated higher than the K20D (overall) and the K10D is rated higher (overall) than the K20D and K200D when taking all factors into account.