Interesting example. I would love to see a comparison with an older generation sensor like a K-3 to see how much things have improved in terms of real-life, practical situations like this one.
Originally posted by gatorguy A
soft hand in either DxO or Topaz DeNoise and all's well for printing this one at your size barring display quality. Make it greyscale and go even larger. Not that a handful of people would have any interest whatsoever in printing the photo that large in the first place no matter how clean the image was. The fact it's captured at all in the light he was dealt is the far more important point IMHO. Sometimes you gotta go with what light you're given in the time constraints you have and using with what you're carrying. Heck a
LOT more than "sometimes".
The excellent dynamic range of the K3III gives us a better chance of capturing shots in far less than ideal conditions.
So impressive recovery Bobbotron, and thanks for showing it.
About noise reduction and the K-3III i'd like to play with some realistic samples in DxO with deepprime noise reduction. I have spent quite a lot of time, out of curiosity, comparing different studio raw samples of several newer and older sensors and see how the NR performs. Unfortunately for some inexplicable reason there is something wrong in the series of shots of the K-3III from the sources I have found. Either blurry shots, or underexposed shots that force to raise exposure in post, therefore not providing a valid comparison with other sensors. Generally, I am not a fan of the effect of the Pentax accelerator unit. It surely does wonders for in-camera jpeg images, and if you have access to more average performing noise reduction software for developing raw. However, comparing for instance the K-1 with K-1ii, the final result after noise reduction from raw at high ISO where the accelerator kicks in is significantly worse for the K-1ii. Note that this is based on shots from studio test scenes, so the setting could very well be artificial. Unfortunately I don't have access to all this cameras to test myself. Nevertheless, loss of detail in the post-NR image is really apparent, even trying to play with settings and using the other less advanced NR modes. It seems to be the case also for the KP, although there is no direct comparison as in the K-1 situation.
On the other hand, from the scarce samples that I found from the new K-3iii, except from the aforementioned and flawed studio scenes which I don't consider reliable, I was under the impression that in spite of the accelerator unit the new camera couples much better with noise reduction in postprocessing.
I know that the topic has been debated to death, and while I could agree that generally speaking the accelerator unit is an improvement, that in most real-life situations there'll be plenty of detail left, and that if you are shooting at high-iso then probably ultimate detail wasn't so critical in the first place; fair enough. Yet, it's one of the factors that i'm considering in evaluating an (unlikely, given the price) upgrade to the new K-3iii.