Originally posted by jlaubza To me, the red on the cup is brighter and the green of the foilage in the background is artificially bright on the Pentax photo. This goes to show that colour preference and not colour accuracy is what any camera produces. I suppose it is easy to set the jpeg settings for both camera's to get closer to each other but be aware that the red channel in the Pentax is driven close to saturation whilst on Canon and Nikon, there is more head room on the red channel. I suppose this is one reason why professionals who PP their raw images stick with Nikon or Canon rather than Pentax. Not to say that Pro's dont use Pentax but they appear to be in the minority.
This is hardly apples to apples. The point of the OP was to suggest the K-r, an entry level DSLR, can hang with a pro model.....costing
significantly more.....in overall image quality. I'm guessing the 645D or the K-5 would have more red channel headroom than the K-r.
Beyond that, I don't see what you're seeing. The red cup in the K-r shot looks "red". The Canon shot looks more of an orange red, and, if anything it looks more "driven to saturation".
Finally, your reference to PP on RAW images after previously talking about JPEG output in the same post doesn't make sense.....it's no processing versus processing. And you even conceded that you could tweak the JPEG output in camera. Pros may not use Pentax as much as Canon, but for a variety of reasons way beyond red channel headroom.