[DIGIDOWNUNDER]

I seriously think you should only listen to people that have owned both. Anything else is purely just hypothesis.
Fellow Aussie Ed Husrt's comments mirrors mine pretty closely in using both. First thing I did was try to get a scene color matched but never could quite get the Z to look exactly like the D, even after considerable tweaking. There is a luminant glow to The D CCD sensor which I find particularly appealing for landscapes despite the lower dynamic range. I tend to use the Z more for professional portraits and commercial work but grab the D for personal work or landscapes. Even though I've got the latest glass I really enjoy using more my D with modified microprism/ split focusing screen and the old A series 35,75,150 & 200 lenses in a pretty compact travel bag. The old A lenses combined with the D is I think Pentax's best kept secret.

[lister6520]

I think the CCD better than CMOS thing is mostly due to the fact that CMOS sensors were first designed as a cheap alternative to CCDs and carried an undeserved reputation of being inferior even when they surpassed CCD in practically all respects.
There is really only one difference between CMOS and CCD that matters and it is the way the information is read out, with CMOS having the advantage of not suffering from blooming (bleed between pixels on the same read line) and some inherent advantage in signal to noise ratio (because the readout process is more direct). All the other differences are either related to reducing the cost of the manufacturing process or simply other technology improvements have been brought about with time and that could actually be applied to CCD sensors as well if one wanted to.
So apart from the blooming and slight difference in noise, most comparisons between CCD and CMOS are just comparisons between sensors of different technological maturity rather than inherently of them being CCD or CMOS.

[tuco]

If I PP my Leica M9 raw files too much, I'd say any CCD color advantage is lost.

[ChristianRock]

It may be related to your RAW processor and the camera profiles that it uses. If using the embedded profile on DNG, it would have been provided by Pentax.


Steve

I use RawTherapee (free software), and I use my own base curve presets for all my cameras, as I find I get better results that way and play to the strength of each camera - of course I can't say for sure that it doesn't do something different for each camera, but as far as I know it doesn't. I'm the one that needs to adjust - usually play with saturation and contrast, and elevating fill light in CMOS, as the fill light with CCD is already at good levels out of the box most of the time - in other words, the CCD seems to have more "built-in latitude" in the original image and so doesn't need as much dynamic range used up to correct the image.

Edit: I also remember that I used Darktable versions 2.6 and 2.7 quite a lot, for a couple of years probably - until version 3 came and they redid how curves and editing works and now getting what I want is like pulling teeth, so I went back to RawTherapee. The way Darktable worked at the time with the base curve was something you picked for your "basic" style - and I picked a Pentax curve - basically a curve set to give a "Pentax look" to your images. They did not have any camera-specific curves and would not read whatever the camera registered from your in-camera settings.

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Last edited by ChristianRock; 11-16-2020 at 07:26 AM.

[pentaxus]

I prefer the look of CMOS. My daughter prefers her K10, but likes my K-3 for it's low light ability.

[DWS1]

I wonder if Eastman Kodak had survived what their sensors would be like today. IMO, their CCD color science was way ahead of everyone else.

[w2ck]

Hi,

One other thing about Kodak is they made their sensors to mimic their films. Kodacolor, Kodachrome, and in the case of the sensor in the 645D, Portra. I still keep a couple of the older Kodak digital backed bodies here for the Kodacolor and Kodachrome looks. And, with those, Kodak had their own raw processing software. Which was good because some of those Kodak models shot only raw. I expect that whatever raw processing profiles are used for the 645D raw files came from Kodak.

And, I also wish that Kodak had kept on going with it all.

Stan

[texandrews]

I seriously think you should only listen to people that have owned both. Anything else is purely just hypothesis.
Fellow Aussie Ed Husrt's comments mirrors mine pretty closely in using both. First thing I did was try to get a scene color matched but never could quite get the Z to look exactly like the D, even after considerable tweaking. There is a luminant glow to The D CCD sensor which I find particularly appealing for landscapes despite the lower dynamic range. I tend to use the Z more for professional portraits and commercial work but grab the D for personal work or landscapes. Even though I've got the latest glass I really enjoy using more my D with modified microprism/ split focusing screen and the old A series 35,75,150 & 200 lenses in a pretty compact travel bag. The old A lenses combined with the D is I think Pentax's best kept secret.

I agree with much of this post, but I will also say that it underlines the use-case scenario. In my professional work, "pleasing" really isn't the goal. Accuracy is, and that cannot be achieved with OOC results no matter how you shoot. I won't go into why here, but people doing product photography that requires accuracy (and I throw in fine arts repro, a subset) will already know what I mean.

OTOH, "pleasing" may indeed be the prime goal for many shooters, and so everything must be optimized for that. But note here that "pleasing" is a subjective criterion---which does not mean illegitimate!----and so it's something that the maker needs to assess holistically in all ways. If you throw in viewer response, then things can get complex fast.

Some commercial work may require "pleasing" or something else---just look at fashion photography as an example. So the maker really needs to carefully parse what's needed. I reject the idea that CCD colors are "superior" to CMOS. No doubt they are different.