[Mike.P®]

I guess my term "noisy" was wrong. It should have been grainy. Here is another totally random shot just to see grain. It was taken at max. quality, no pp except resizing.

You are shooting at ISO 6400.

What do you expect?

Considering the ISO setting I would say that was very good .. would like to see your K100D super do anything near tha ... oh, it can't though.

Focus is well off though.

[Wheatfield]

You are shooting at ISO 6400 with sharpness and contrast set to hard. Everything you are doing is trying to bring up noise, and you are getting noise because of it.
Your image is somewhat underexposed as well, which isn't helping.
You were correct the first time, the correct term is noise.
Grain relates to film.

[cats_five]

Instead of resizing a crop small enough to post unsize would show the problem far better. Resizing collates many pixels into one.

And at ISO 6400 I'm not surprised there is digital noise. Grain is a film thing.

[piesforyou]

Are you using auto ISO set to a range including 6400?

Try this. Set the ISO to 200, shoot outside in good light. Post a 100% crop of a part of your image (not resized - resizing is actually a method of noise reduction). And use RAW to eliminate any in camera settings.

[riley9]

Thanks for all of your replies and constructive criticism. After following your suggestions and further testing I sent the camera for repair. I still had sig. noise using RAW and 200 ISO with an aperture of f8. Hopefully, I will get it back before our April vacation.

[Wheatfield]

Thanks for all of your replies and constructive criticism. After following your suggestions and further testing I sent the camera for repair. I still had sig. noise using RAW and 200 ISO with an aperture of f8. Hopefully, I will get it back before our April vacation.

I note here that you are not saying anything about whether you are exposing correctly, only that you are using a particular ISO and aperture. Correct exposure is very important.

[twitch]

Your photo above was taken at ISO 6400, it's going to be noisey at that high level.

I think your camera is fine, you need to develop more experience in using your camera so you know how to minimise noise in your pictures, one of those ways is to use lower ISO's (eg grab a flash rather than jus crank up ISO) and to never under expose when you use 1600+.

[twitch]

Thanks for all of your replies and constructive criticism. After following your suggestions and further testing I sent the camera for repair. I still had sig. noise using RAW and 200 ISO with an aperture of f8. Hopefully, I will get it back before our April vacation.

I can get excessive noise at ISO100 if I want to, I'd underexpose a couple of stops, boost in post processing, and then pixel peep in shadows. Noise is in all pictures at all ISOs.

I think your camera is fine and the noise you are seeing is a combination of user error (under exposure, over sharpening) and unrealistic expectations. You are wasting your time and Chris's time sending in your camera when you should be learning the basics with camera in hand before your trip.

[Wheatfield]

I can get excessive noise at ISO100 if I want to, I'd underexpose a couple of stops, boost in post processing, and then pixel peep in shadows. Noise is in all pictures at all ISOs.

I think your camera is fine and the noise you are seeing is a combination of user error (under exposure, over sharpening) and unrealistic expectations. You are wasting your time and Chris's time sending in your camera when you should be learning the basics with camera in hand before your trip.

+1. I hate to sound like I am piling on, but I think more exposure and less aggressive sharpening is the key here.
Something I would invite you to do is to make some real photographs of your files and see if the noise is offensive.
Remember that when you look at an image at 100%, you have effectively blown it up to several feet by several more feet and are looking at it from a few inches.
Noise is generally a small enough artifact that in prints it becomes a very small problem.
Please, while you wait for your camera to come back, take some of the files you have and reprocess them with less aggressive sharpening, and when you get your camera back, turn the sharpening down to N or N- and do your sharpening in post.
You are over sharpening, and it is causing artifacting and will be increasing noise levels as well.

[riley9]

Thank you for the advice. I have MANY images with noise at 100%, without any post processing and without pushing the exposure. I purchased the K-r so that I would be able to enlarge the images. If I just wanted 4x6s my K100 would be sufficient. I have a friend who is a pro photographer and they were surprised by the amount of noise. If it's my error-so be it, I will be the first to admit that there is more to learn however this is my 4th digital camera and I have used pp for years. Yes, they were over-sharpened; I was trying to reproduce what I was seeing but not capturing. Thank you all for your feedback.

[cats_five]

Since your pro friends probably use Canon/Nikon they might be quick to blame the camera.

I guess that 'noise at 100%' means when you zoom in to a 100% view of an image, and if I did that I would expect to see noise at ISO 800 onwards from most APS-C digital cameras, except for the latest crop - K5 for example. It comes along with those as well, just at a higher ISO.

I did find some on-line tests of the K-r and none of them mention noise as a problem - indeed several say it's a low noise camera. These are the first four I looked at, there was another one that was hanging:
Pentax K-r Digital SLR Review
Pentax K-r review (with DAL 18-55mm) | Expert Reviews
Pentax K-r Review | Digital Camera Resource Page
Hands-on Report: Pentax K-r DSLR camera review | Camera Gear Guide

So, either you have a dud or it is something to do with either how you are processing the images, and/or your expectations.

You have posted some iamges.

The first one that had EXIF was shot at ISO 800 and looked to be massively oversharpened - there are obvious halos round the twigs in the bottom RH corner. With that amount of sharpening it's not possible to see what the original image quality is like.

The second one was shot in poor light at ISO 6400, f4, 1/15, and it's no surprise it shows some digital noise.

We haven't seen one taken outside, in decent light, at ISO 200, on auto, with all the settings at normal values e.g. trawl through the menus and make sure settings are set to normal, especially the ones to do with noise reduction and sharpening.

I was trying to reproduce what I was seeing but not capturing

I really don't understand this.

FWIW I was able to make reasonable A4 prints from a Fuji camera with a similar number of pixels to the K100D. It was a cheap and nasty camera that produced awfully soft RAW images (or horribly oversharpened JPG ones), but with shooting RAW and some careful PP a few of them were OK and did well at the camera club. Apart from producing innately better image quality (better glass, better sensors, better camera software) images, the one thing the extra pixels in it's replacements have let me do is more dramatic cropping.

[cats_five]

Since your pro friends probably use Canon/Nikon they might be quick to blame the camera.

I guess that 'noise at 100%' means when you zoom in to a 100% view of an image, and if I did that I would expect to see noise at ISO 800 onwards from most APS-C digital cameras, except for the latest crop - K5 for example. It comes along with those as well, just at a higher ISO.

I did find some on-line tests of the K-r and none of them mention noise as a problem - indeed several say it's a low noise camera. These are the first four I looked at, there was another one that was hanging:
Pentax K-r Digital SLR Review
Pentax K-r review (with DAL 18-55mm) | Expert Reviews
Pentax K-r Review | Digital Camera Resource Page
Hands-on Report: Pentax K-r DSLR camera review | Camera Gear Guide

So, either you have a dud or it is something to do with either how you are processing the images, and/or your expectations.

You have posted some iamges.

The first one that had EXIF was shot at ISO 800 and looked to be massively oversharpened - there are obvious halos round the twigs in the bottom RH corner. With that amount of sharpening it's not possible to see what the original image quality is like.

The second one was shot in poor light at ISO 6400, f4, 1/15, and it's no surprise it shows some digital noise.

We haven't seen one taken outside, in decent light, at ISO 200, on auto, with all the settings at normal values e.g. trawl through the menus and make sure settings are set to normal, especially the ones to do with noise reduction and sharpening.

I was trying to reproduce what I was seeing but not capturing

I really don't understand this.

FWIW I was able to make reasonable A4 prints from a Fuji camera with a similar number of pixels to the K100D. It was a cheap and nasty camera that produced awfully soft RAW images (or horribly oversharpened JPG ones), but with shooting RAW and some careful PP a few of them were OK and did well at the camera club. Apart from producing innately better image quality (better glass, better sensors, better camera software) images, the one thing the extra pixels in it's replacements have let me do is more dramatic cropping.

[Wheatfield]

Thank you for the advice. I have MANY images with noise at 100%, without any post processing and without pushing the exposure. I purchased the K-r so that I would be able to enlarge the images. If I just wanted 4x6s my K100 would be sufficient. I have a friend who is a pro photographer and they were surprised by the amount of noise. If it's my error-so be it, I will be the first to admit that there is more to learn however this is my 4th digital camera and I have used pp for years. Yes, they were over-sharpened; I was trying to reproduce what I was seeing but not capturing. Thank you all for your feedback.

Since you are saying no PP, I presume you mean out of camera jpegs?
What are your NR settings?
Pentax is much more conservative that Nikon or (especially) Canon WRT noise reduction. You might have to turn your NR up quite a bit higher to match the apparent lack of noise from a Nikon or Canon camera.

[piesforyou]

Let us know what Pentax say about it anyway.

[twitch]

I have MANY images with noise at 100%

I don't understand your point. All my images over 200 ISO have some noise I can see when zooming in to 100%. This is completely normal for the K-x, K-r and for all digital cameras.