Originally posted by d.bradley Canon: High noise reduction, fast AF, high FPS, lower resolution.
Sony: Medium noise reduction, fast AF, high FPS, medium resolution
Nikon: Low noise reduction, med AF, high FPS, medium resolution
Pentax: Low noise reduction, med AF, low fps, higher resolution
I don't agree with your propositions which do not match my own experiences with Canon, Nikon and Pentax DSLRs.
Canon DSLRs are not with "high noise reduction" and "low resolution" as you suggested. They do have low noise but high resolution which means a high signal-to-noise ratio which is in fact the most desirable thing.
As for the Nikons, they usually have more noise but yet maintain a high resolution.
Whether you agree or not, Pentax do have higher noise and lower resolution, this have been verified from various lab tests including DPR and IR tests, e.g. the K10D against others. As for the AF, you need to further separating it for its speed and accuracy, and further divided into if under daylight and tungsten, also for steady or moving objects and so on. Well, there is also the metering and exposure accuracy departments.
If I have to rank those performance aspect, to name a few, I would rank as follows:
Resolution: C > N >> P
Noise: C >> N > P
AF speed: C > N >> P
AF accuracy (steady object, daylight): C ~ N ~ P (K DSLRs are better here)
* ~ means similar
AF speed and accuracy (moving, daylight): C > N >> P
AF accuracy (steady, tungsten): C ~ N > P
Metering accuracy: N > C >> P
Exposure (control) accuracy: C > N ~ P
.... and so on..
All in all, I totally disagree with you that it is about different styles and design philosophy. It is just about (huge) difference in performance and accuracy. There is still a long road to run for Pentax to catch up. Well, there is always a good reason why they so far do not have a real upper market DSLR model yet. The sad thing is if we compare the MZ film SLRs to the K DSLRs, actually the AF speed and accuracy at low light is obviously better and the metering accuracy is good enough too (so, I just wonder why Pentax DSLRs are inferior than the previous MZ cameras which should be made with older technology, sad).