Originally posted by Azzy High ISO seems to be as good as K5 or maybe a bit worse, further testing is still required.
So I've started loading all my DNGs from our Halloween party into Adobe Camera Raw (I use ACR 8.1 via Bridge CS6) and here are a few things I've noticed from some "practical" experience.
- High ISOs look a bit worse than the K-5 (as Azzy says above) in terms of the amount of noise, but it seems finer grained (well, hey, 24MP...). It seems the K-5 gets a lot more Chroma noise, but the K-3 gets all kinds of Luminance as the ISOs ramp up. Perhaps this is where noise profiles will be the saving grace?
- The K-3 focuses very well and very confidently in low light, even in full dark (outdoors in the rain). My K-5 would never even attempt what the K-3 could do while we were trick-n-treating. (This is with center single focus-and-recompose, which is my style.) Maybe the K-5II is the same?
- The metering tends to expose a bit brighter than my K-5, at least that's what it seems like. I set the camera to TAv and my Auto-ISO goes to 12,800 with a slow ramp (personal preference) and ended up with Exp. Comp. -1.0 the whole night, indoors and out.
- The AWB is actually pretty good, and handles mixed lighting with aplomb. Unfortunately, it seems ACR doesn't entirely understand how to process the "Multi Auto WB" so what I saw in the preview is gone in ACR and I have to fiddle with the sliders. Hopefully an update from Adobe will fix this... or maybe it's a JPEG-only kind of magic.
- The Dynamic Range in the raw files (as of ACR 8.1 via DNG) is quite a bit less in the K-3 than in the K-5. Where the K-5 could boost shadows from a black blob to decent detail, the K-3 gets monochromatic noisy. Highlights are also hard to recover... but again, this might just be that there is no raw camera profile for this model yet. There would have to be a huge difference to get back up to the K-5 plasticity, though...
- I rarely use flash, but popped up the onboard for a few shots. It exposed very well, and only looked a bit harsh in that pop-up kind of flash way.
Here's an example of the pop-up flash (firing over the DA 35 Macro Ltd.) and
please note the girl is a VAMPIRE - she has white and green makeup on her face!
However, the 24MP and the laser-like focus of the K-3 completely knocked one part of this photo out of the pixel-peeping park:
(100% pixel level crop)
And here is an example of ISO 12800 after I ran it through Nik Define (the noise tools in ACR kinda suck on the K-3 images). Also, I couldn't pull the shadows up one bit at this ISO... there is no DR left in the image, but it looks pretty accurate to what I saw:
Last edited by panoguy; 10-31-2013 at 07:42 PM.