Originally posted by falconeye @PentaxPoke, I did appreciate your effort. And I tried to be not that inpolite
As a matter of fact,
you see it at 100% on
your computer screen, we don't. The noise disappears a lot and the resolution increases a lot when you downsize. So it depends what you want to communicate to us...
Did you click on "Original" and then "Download Original Size?" The Original file size is very large. That is much larger than would be needed for a typical print.
This is not directed at you, but the point was that reviews that say the k20d performance is "unacceptable" or not useable over iso 1600 are completely ridiculous. Maybe if someone wants to print poster size and then look at the photo with thier nose against the paper, it would be "unacceptable." I think that the tests simply show the iso3200 and even iso6400 can be very useable! I took one of those pictures in almost complete darkness!
What I am trying to communicate is this: A parent taking pictures of thier children in an important indoor event such as a recital (no flash) aren't going to care that a 14.7 MP image is noisy when viewed at 1:1, which is the equivalent of looking at a poster sized image up close. What they will care about is that they can get a wonderful, and very printable shot of the event with this camera even up to iso6400 if they properly expose. I get a little frustrated reading the opinions of these "pixel nerds" that base a camera's worth on tiny crops of a very small region of a picture of a liquor bottle. If all one did is read popphoto, or other web review sites, you would think that our camera is completely useless above ISO800.
I think the more we can show our experience with our Pentax gear in realistic examples, the more we can educate people not to worry about the dire evaluations of magazine and web reviewers. My iso6400 image has over 1900 hits. Just doing my part to get the word out.
/rant off