[madbrain]

Yes, of course. If you exposed properly in the first place, even ISO 25000 images can look decent. But nobody is going to (or should) pixel peep those images because they are severely compromised on any camera. The differences between brands is minimal to non-existent at this point if you are printing images. Your subject matter, lighting, composition, and post-processing technique have far more to do with the quality of the end result than the tiny differences in sharpness. The megapixels don't even matter anymore for 99.99% of images; heck, cell phones do "good enough" in most conditions at this point, with zero processing required after the fact. The point is, the entire issue has been blown out of proportion and has nothing to do with photography.

I don't agree. There is absolutely no way I could have taken the cat pic in my dark home theater with a cell phone. Even a top of the line Note 8 still has ISO 800 max, which means there is no way to get a shot without blur because the shutter speed has to be way too slow. And even if there is no motion blur, the picture still looks like crap, pretty much, no other way to put it.

On APS-C on my K-30, images under those conditions look decent at ISO 3,200 - 6,400, but not ISO 25,600.
On micro 4/3 with my GX85, ISO 25,600 is the top ISO and unusable. ISO 6,400 is not great.
I find that sensor size matters a lot for indoor lighting conditions.

There is no way I could have taken the first pic in the thread below with any camera I own other than my K-1 II. First pic there is at ISO 12,800 .
Cat - PentaxForums.com

That image could be pixel-peeped if needed. I made a 13x19 print out of it. I didn't publish the entire 36MP file, though.

[DaveSimo]

madbrain, your photo is a fantastic example of how much the K1 Mark II excels. Good work and cute kittie


Let's sort out this "dynamic range of K1 Mark II being crappy and giving purple" issue once and for all (or do our best at least). This is inspired by Cameraville's multiple Lightroom-edited reviews of the underexposed Mark II images, where he was very disappointed with its purple blacks


We need to get away from this idea of RAW files being baked because, in my eyes, sometimes it seems they're cooked to near-enough perfectio in the Mark II. I'm shooting at ISO 6400 without an ounce of worry - with my K1 I really wouldn't have done this past ISO 3200, and even that would be a bit of a hesitation.

Cameraville is an awesome channel but he does not do enough to scrutinise the things he is doing. First of all, Lightroom is a pile of poo when it comes to Pentax support. I love everything about it, except camera support. Capture One and Affinity Photo do a much better job (though it took Capture One a good few years to even entertain the Pentax brand )

He also needs to address the simpler but crucial things such as why is it really that the purple artefacts switch from the K! to Mark II as he zooms out? He says in the comments it's due to his PC loading these huge files but this is, I'm afraid, plain wrong. It's actually down to the compressed preview of what you're working on and how this is then processed into a JPEG. If you zoom right in to a test shot of a Mark II after bringing up the exposure by 4 or 5 stops (whatever you underexposed by) then you'll see that upon very close inspection the artefacts disappear in Lightroom, but zoom out a little (say 1:2) and they come back. This is especially apparent once colour noise reduction has been applied above a value of 1. Even with smoothness pushed to 100 it's still there, yet once again disappears on zooming in. When you go to develop a 100% quality large JPEG, the artefacts are there. When you go to develop a TIF, sometimes they're actually gone. Even freakier, when you adjust the tint the artefacts shift very randomly and, at times, either take over the whole photo or completely disappear.


In short, Lightroom needs to sort themselves out! Also, please let's not discuss the dynamic range "test" on DPReview of the K1 Mark II. The K1 photos use a 77mm FA Ltd and the K1 Mark II a DFA 24-70mm. But it's not so much about the lenses as it is about the lighting and that the scene is ever so slightly different. Just look at the champagne bottle reflections and the missing peacock feather on the top-right


Anyways, to prove to you guys how incredible the Mark II truly is I have made a +4EV adjustments profile for Capture One. Just use this as a "style" within the software. If you need help with this just let me know and I'll walk you through it. Honestly I have never seen such incredible image recovery at a 4-stop push. Well, maybe from a D810 but then the noise is equal to that of K1 whereas the Mark II does incredibly with noise.


Another thing I've wanted to mention is this idea of sacrificing fine details for ISO in the Mark II. We have to remember that any attempt to match the noise level in the K1 to that of a comparable K1 Mark II shot would mean a loss in fine details also - in some cases more severely than what Mark II achieves in-camera. Remember that RAW files are just numbers for the software to interpret. Factory-set processing carried out in camera is one of the most accurate ways of messing with those RAW files rather than relying on a bit of software that tries to cater for an entire industry.


So the Capture One "Style" (this is similar to what would be called a "preset" in Lightroom) is there to give you those deep blacks and eliminate any purple and magenta, without sacrificing those hues in any other non-shadow or non-black part of your image. I've not included any white balance changes since that's obviously best left for you to manually manage.

Let me just finalise this by saying that I bet by now you probably think "oh, here we go. Somebody who bought into the Mark II or got a K1 upgraded and is now reaching for sour grapes." Well, nothing could be further from the truth. I actually almost replaced my Mark II with a K1 when I saw those Cameraville videos a few months ago. However I decided to do my own testing and realised there's a lot more than meets the eye - quite literally. Also the AF of the Mark II is so much nicer for BIF and sports. Love it to bits


My attachment is here (first message as OP): K1 Mark II Dynamic Range - Purple and/or Magenta Artefacts

Enjoy

I can also make a similar preset for Affinity Photo if anybody is interested.