[rlg118]

Since I am still new to digital photography, I posted this in the Beginners' area.

I have a Pentax K110D which I purchased used a few weeks ago. It is my first DSLR. Due to health and family issues which have occupied much of my time, I am still in the "try it and see what works" stage.

Last night, at the height of the snowstorm which hit the Northeast, I decided to play with it some more. I also pulled out my Nikon Coolpix L810, a point-and-shoot rig which I was given for my birthday earlier in the year, to do a comparison.

I set both cameras to "Night Scene" or "Night Landscape" and didn't tweak any settings. I had both perched on a porch railing to reduce any shake to a minimum. The results are below.

The Pentax photo is darker and redder, and the Nikon photo's colors are much more accurate. The little Nikon wins this one, hands down. Now, in the back of my head, this little voice is starting to say "Why the @#$! did you bother buying the Pentax?" And if my wife finds out, that little voice will be much louder!

I have to leave for work now, so I will not be able to see any replies until late tonight. Here's hoping that someone here can offer some suggestions on how to do better so that the little voice goes away...

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[Docrwm]

If the top is the Nikon and the bottom Pentax (the bottom one on my screen is both darker and redder as you stated) then I MUCH prefer the bottom photo for several reasons - its MUCH sharper and provides dramatically more detail in the shadows. You can adjust the JPG processing in camera to make the colors more to your liking but the sharpness and depth in the photo is not something you can tweak in the Nikon point & shoot.

Look at the signs in the two photos. The Nikon signs are unreadable. The Pentax signs are perfectly readable.

Look at the stop light at the end of the street. In the Nikon it is a muddy orangy-yellow. In the Pentax it's actually red as it should be.

Look at the street light. In the Nikon its just a smear. In the Pentax it looks like precipitation is falling.

There is no comparison between the two for me. The Pentax kills the other on so many levels.

[Vindemiatrix]

You need to learn to see better my friend... the bottom photo is the better one by far.

[mrNewt]

Is a matter of finding the right white balance.
A DSLR is not really a point a shoot ... you have to do a little bit of tweaking in order to make things to your liking.

I also prefer the second photo more because there is more detail and white balance can be fixed by doing a little bit of post-processing.

[Na Horuk]

Also, keep in mind that point and shoots are optimized to make pleasing jpegs, but DSLRs are designed mostly for people to shoot raw and post process themselves, people who tweak white balance and stuff as they see fit.
Its an ok test, but I think you will find a huge difference once you learn how to use the camera better. Then you will wonder how you were ever satisfied with a P&S

[THoog]

That 6MP sensor (used in the "*ist" series, the K100D, and the K110D) did have an annoying tendency to "go orange" in low light. Digital sensors have made huge leaps in low light performance in the past five years. Since I do a lot of shooting in museums, I was always fussing with the white balance settings. If you can, try shooting RAW and adjust the white balance on a computer. Back in '08 or so, I was griping about it, and the guy next to me said "yeah, my Canon does the same thing, only purple. I just fix it in Lightroom." So it was not a problem unique to Pentax.

[London Rob]

2nd picture is sharper by a country mile. I'm pretty sure it says Certified Services on the sign centre left, on the top shot you can't even tell it's words. Echoing the comment above, you have sharpness and clarity, just learn what tweaks you can do in camera and out to deliver the colours you see or want.

The Pentax is giving you a great platform to create great photographs.
Unless of course the top picture is the K110d !!!

[aurele]

if it's only about WB it can be tweaked easily by punting it to tungsten or around 2000 kelvin if you want the WB of the nikon picture.

for all the reason explain by others i prefer the 2nd one.

[mrNewt]

This is a very quick job, but with a little bit of tweaking, things will change drastically:



Sorry if image loads slowly, my server seems to be sluggish today ...

[OldPentaxFan]

Since I am still new to digital photography, I posted this in the Beginners' area.

I have a Pentax K110D which I purchased used a few weeks ago. It is my first DSLR. Due to health and family issues which have occupied much of my time, I am still in the "try it and see what works" stage.

Last night, at the height of the snowstorm which hit the Northeast, I decided to play with it some more. I also pulled out my Nikon Coolpix L810, a point-and-shoot rig which I was given for my birthday earlier in the year, to do a comparison.

I set both cameras to "Night Scene" or "Night Landscape" and didn't tweak any settings. I had both perched on a porch railing to reduce any shake to a minimum. The results are below.

The Pentax photo is darker and redder, and the Nikon photo's colors are much more accurate. The little Nikon wins this one, hands down. Now, in the back of my head, this little voice is starting to say "Why the @#$! did you bother buying the Pentax?" And if my wife finds out, that little voice will be much louder!

I have to leave for work now, so I will not be able to see any replies until late tonight. Here's hoping that someone here can offer some suggestions on how to do better so that the little voice goes away...

You need to work with the K110 some to get to know it better. White balance on the Nikon is a bit better, which is why the color is 'whiter'. Street lights, especially sodium vapor lights, aren't easy to get right and the reddish tone comes from the balance being off. It can easily be corrected in post processing. What you will find is that the Pentax will make you work a bit harder as a photographer to get exactly the image you want. The Nikon sets everything for you the way the Engineers at Nikon think the picture should look like. On of the biggest advantages of the Pentx is it's flexibility to make adjustments to exposure - meaning aperture and shutter speed, mage quality (how much detail is included in the image file) as the others have mentioned, appears better with the Pentax image than the Nikon image, which is to be expected given the differences between the cameras.

You may want to work with RAW files rather than JPG files as well. They will contain much more color and image detail which you can use in post processing to create the image you had im your minds eye when you took the picture. If you don't have software yet, there are several great reviews here on the forum to help you choose whats best for you.

Good luck, and tell those little voices in your head to have a bit more patience until you can learn more about using your camera.

[interested_observer]

Yours is a classic story of someone moving from a point and shoot to a dSLR. A P&S is already setup for most situations - where you just point it and push the button to shoot - done, you get a jpg and off you go.

A dSLR is more of a manual effort by design, even when it is in "automagic" mode. There are still quite a few manual parameters that can be set that have a lot of influence over the outcome. You hit on one of them - the color / casting of the street lamps. This is referred to as "white balance" in cameras. Each type of light casts a slightly different color hue based on the material from which they are made. This light is measured in light temperature (Kelvin). In every post processing utility, you can adjust the white balance - color temperature (of the light), as well as setting the camera when you take the image.

P&S also have a much smaller sensor, which due to its size, essentially makes everything in focus nearly all the time (the physics of optical engineering). A dSLR with a much larger sensor, is much more sensitive to focusing issues, and having the lens set to the proper focus - as defined by the person looking through the viewfinder. Think of a picture where the object is in perfect focus, however the background is out of focus. The object in focus is set off from the background - on purpose and by design - to give it a 3D effect and show separation. A P&S camera is unable to do this for the most part. This, along with other techniques is why folks pick up dSLRs.

As far as your wife finding out - think of this as moving from an automatic transmission to a manual stick shift. You are going to have to do a bit of learning as to how to drive it first, before you take it out on a spin on the freeway, with the family along for the ride.

[elliott]

Something to remember is that better cameras don't necessarily GIVE you a better picture, they ALLOW you to make a better picture. This requires more effort on your part, you have to understand what is going on to get the best out of it. A DSLR is not easier to use than a point and shoot to a beginner, but once you learn more about exposure, processing and just light in general the DSLR will be easier to get good results from.

I had a K100D for 4 years, most of my first shots were absolutely terrible. It took a long time before I felt I was ready for a better camera.

I do agree with the others though, the bottom shot is so much better.

[GabrielFFontes]

The bottom picture is bizarrely better.
You can just tweak the white balance to get better colors, but the top picture is SOFT...unusable.

[LaurenOE]

The bottom is so much better it's laughable!!!

[Parallax]

First, I agree with the others that the bottom one is the better of the two, as the top one is way over exposed
Okay, so you didn't tweak anything, and that's the problem........... sort of. The reason they are different is they were processed by two different people, and neither of them was you. One was processed by the person who wrote the Nikon firmware, and the other by the one who wrote the Pentax firmware. Neither person was there to see the scene, and neither had any idea what the tastes of the person using the camera would be. They were making their best guess.

"Why the @#$! did you bother buying the Pentax?

This is a really good example of why to buy a DSLR; Pentax or other. YOU get to decide what the picture looks like, not somebody else. Shoot RAW for maximum control and you can have the pictures you want.
If you're just going to shoot exclusively in some sort of scene mode, and don't want to do any PP, stick to your point-and-shoot. It's a lot easier to carry around.

(As a general rule when processing night scenes, try and avoid making the image look the way your brain interpreted what your eyes saw and concentrate on what they actually saw.)