Originally posted by Gimbal At pixel level, the K-5 and the K-1 were expected to be more or less equal.
Well, that's hypocritical of you.
Why did you imply otherwise in your Post 172?
Remember the topic is
noise, not resolution. A K-3 has more resolution than the FF Canon 5D MkIII.
Originally posted by Gimbal
But in those cases were we will be using the entire sensor (hopefully most of the time) we should be looking at the SNR of the whole picture.
@Gimbal, you still have this lack of understanding. The SNR of the whole pictures using the full sensor areas of the K-5 IIS and D810 is the same - that's what DxO found. That's the screen tab. They measured the RAW files, and got 21.4dB and 21.5dB.
You can try and average out the noise though by downsampling in post processing -
the more pixels the better, but this is software and your algorithm may have dreadful consequences as Nicolas found.
I speak as someone who shoots and post-processes both 16Mp APS-C and 36Mp FF.
Again, noise is all about the number of pixels, their technology and their well capacity, not the wafer underneath them. 'Total light' and 'sensor area' is bollocks.