Originally posted by aruk5 So I wasnt imagining after all when I felt the k-x images lacked detail compared to the K100d. For a while I was thinking it was a fault with my camera's sensors but after reading some of your replies I can understand its not! its really bad manufacturing of the sensor! Wonder how they got away with such a thing! In their ads Pentax make tall claims about how great the pics look when clicked with the K-x when a serious issue such as a lack of detail [especially in smaller objects] is there with this camera!
Whoa, whoa, slow down. No one said anything about Pentax's CMOS chips being defective. They're not. They're not even made by Pentax, actually (Samsung before, and Sony, now... the same sensors that appear in Sony and Nikon cameras, actually).
Quote: By the way I wonder if this problem of pentax's cmos sensor based camera showing less detail is only restricted to pentax cameras and not to cmos sensor based cameras made by the biggies such as Canon or Nikon. Any of u having such cameras might wanna share your experience in regard to the issue of detail.
CMOS sensors are the standard for consumer dslrs now. They have their advantages and disadvantages, per interested_observer's list. You're not the first to notice the difference in rendering between a CCD and CMOS chips. Part of this is due to the sensor itself, and part of it will be due to the algorithms that build the image from the raw data, which change from camera to camera. In particular as relates to Pentax, people have complained that the recent generations of cameras take images that are too cold, making it difficult to reproduce the warmer colors Pentax was known for. I'm confident that most of this can be fixed by tweaking things in raw, or adjusting the onboard settings for your camera. Though, it's probably not worth chasing down the EXACT same look your old camera produced.
Quote: Thats another major major gripe I have this camera, its tendency to blow out the highlights! Inspite of lots of trial and error I kept getting shots with lots of blown highlights! its worse when I shoot street scenes with lots of lights and darks at the same time. In order for the dark areas to appear clearly I would expose more but the highlights would get blown way too much and there was no way to recover it in raw either! By the way this is regard to handheld shots in the night! When I click with a tripod and stop down the aperture then I get a better image but the purpose gets defeated as my aim is really to shoot handheld shots at night!
By the way I will try the settings mentioned in ur reply and see if it works!
I think you're conflating unrelated things here. The tendency to expose to the right at the expense of highlights by the camera's defaults is different from your need for a wide dynamic range to capture light and dark areas simultaneously without clipping on either end of the histogram. Exposing for dark areas in high contrast scenes will blow out the highlights on any camera. Choosing what to preserve is a decision every photography needs to make at the eyepiece.
Shooting in high contrast scenes in the dark handheld is probably one of the most difficult scenarios you can place your camera in, so expectations for its performance should not be unrealistic. When you're handheld you're going to be using higher ISO sensitivity in order to keep shutter speed high, but you should know that dynamic range narrows as ISO increases. This is probably why your tripod-mounted shots turn out better -- I assume you are turning down the ISO because shutter speed is no longer a concern. Your dynamic range at ISO100 will be far wider than at ISO1600, allowing you to retain more detail on either end of the exposure histogram without clipping.