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07-16-2008, 08:55 AM   #31
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QuoteOriginally posted by MrApollinax Quote
I'm looking at the EXIF data for your pictures.

Of the two pictures of your house I see that Auto WB opted to use the "White Flourescent" settings as well as the picture of the stump. The picture of the grass and power lines AWB opted to use the "Daylight" setting. If you manually WB do the images render correctly? It looks like Contrast and Sharpness are bumped up on the camera. Is this correct?
Interesting, I had not noticed that. If nothing else, that would speak to some dodgy AWB behavior. Still, the daylight setting should have worked for the powerline shot, and the dry grass should be a nice golden brown color.

Contrast and sharpness were at factory default settings for all shots. I also noticed that saturation is over-the-top. On a couple shots where the colors looked better, i.e. not so yellow, I had to roll off saturation in Elements by 40% to get the colors to be lifelike to my eye.

The shots I took yesterday with manual WB definitely yielded different results but not necessarily more accurate. I will try a few more today before boxing the camera up.

07-16-2008, 08:58 AM   #32
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Return.

How did you get them to take it back? Did you send example pictures? I bought mine online from an Amazon merchant. Did you contact Pentax directly or who you bought it from? I'm really considering sending mine back also and would like to know how painful the process will be.
07-18-2008, 07:03 AM   #33
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I see your woods, grass and siding pictures just fine in IE.
07-18-2008, 03:26 PM   #34
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Update - K200D #2

I have the replacement camera in hand and a few shots have shown improved results but I am waiting for the clouds to lift so I can shoot in the same sunny conditions.

A post above about the AWB setting got me to wondering about the camera's AWB behavior and it seems odd to say the least. I noticed that the chosen setting is almost always coming up with some form of flourescent (most often opting for white fluorescent). This is true of both the first camera and the replacement. Even though lighting is quite different (sunny vs. cloudy), the camera still selects white fluorescent.

The results this morning however, even with the same white fluorescent AWB selection seem pretty accurate, much more so than with the first camera. However, as I mentioned, the conditions are quite different as it is very cloudy today.

All that said, the auto selection of the white fluorescent WB mode outdoors in both sunny and cloudy conditions is puzzling. And this morning when I manually set WB to cloudy to match the actual conditions, the results were again terribly inaccurate with a strong yellow cast. Perhaps it wasn't cloudy or dark enough for that setting?

Lastly, does the AWB in the K200D simply meter and set WB to one of the pre-set settings as opposed to setting a specific color temp? I thought AWB in most cameras set an actual temp as opposed to simply selecting a pre-set WB mode.

I see a little blue sky, more later...

07-18-2008, 03:39 PM   #35
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QuoteOriginally posted by JN99 Quote
Lastly, does the AWB in the K200D simply meter and set WB to one of the pre-set settings as opposed to setting a specific color temp? I thought AWB in most cameras set an actual temp as opposed to simply selecting a pre-set WB mode.
I have the K200D and that's what I thought it did. Why would you think otherwise? How are you knowing what it set the white balance to after you take the shot? Are you shooting in JPG?

I just shoot raw and then I can adjust the white balance afterwards, though usually I leave it alone as it seems to me that the K200D does a pretty good job most of the time.
07-18-2008, 03:41 PM   #36
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One thing I seem to find myself doing no matter what he setting is adjusting the WB from the center over to blue.
07-18-2008, 03:44 PM   #37
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QuoteOriginally posted by sewebster Quote
How are you knowing what it set the white balance to after you take the shot? Are you shooting in JPG?
It's in the EXIF data

07-18-2008, 03:54 PM   #38
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QuoteOriginally posted by Jodokast96 Quote
One thing I seem to find myself doing no matter what he setting is adjusting the WB from the center over to blue.
I might resign myself to some similar form of tweaking as well, but it seems to me you should be able to get more accurate results without doing so.

Look at the shots in this link and compare the Canon 40D shots to the K200D. There is an obvious green/blue cast to the K200 shot of the B&W billboard, and the image just below is much more orange in the K200 example than the red shown from the 40D. Now I have no idea what those are supposed to look like, but it certainly shows a tendency of the K200D to push too much yellow and green to my eyes.
07-18-2008, 04:40 PM   #39
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QuoteOriginally posted by JN99 Quote
It's in the EXIF data
Mine just all say "White Balance: Auto" in the EXIF. This is RAW converted to JPG with Lightroom (without adjusting WB) then read using "Exif Viewer" on a Mac.

Maybe I don't know what I'm doing.
07-20-2008, 06:14 PM   #40
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Update:

A little more time with the first K200D and I could have saved myself some headache (and a few dollars) butI had to return it as my 14 day window was at day 14. Upon further comparison with camera #2 I have found the results to be virtually identical, which is to say, terribly innacurate but read on.

This time I dug a little deeper and found that, out of the box with default settings (bright) the K200D just takes horribly innaccrate, overly yellow/green photos. Those of you insisting things looked okay on your calibrated monitors, need to see these new results that show just how bad the dafault settings are for the K200D. To me, this is unacceptable, you shouldn't be ABLE to get results this bad much less have them be the result of a default setting.

To get the results I did today I had the K200D set to neutral with both saturation and hue bumped down 2 notches. The shot looks MUCH better, the grass now looks pretty much as it should and the trees look much more natural as well.

K200D #1, Aperture Priority, AWB (daylight), default (Bright) setting


K200D #2, Aperture Priority, AWB (Daylight), tweaked settings


Rebel Xsi, Aperture Priority, AWB, Neutral setting


There's no doubt these changes yielded much improved results, though in some regards I still think the Rebel is slightly more accurate if perhaps not quite as pleasing to the eye. In a couple of other comparisons between K200D and Rebel Xsi, I found the K200 yielded richer, deeper color with better exposure; the Rebel overexposed a lot of shots and also seems to have less dynamic range.
07-20-2008, 06:55 PM   #41
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glad to see this was a simple fix I caught this thread too late, otherwise I would have told you to try the JPEG setting first.


I also have decided against using "bright" for JPEG on my K20D.

On the K200D I never really noticed a problem, but on the K20D (same settings) it was just oversaturating way too much.

I switched to "Natural" and everything was fine.
07-20-2008, 07:26 PM   #42
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People's color perception varies. The new shot (as the one from the Xsi) looks unnatural to me, very unsaturated. I doubt that scene would have those colours to me in person. Maybe it fits your memory of the scene.

Neither sensors nor eyes have a perfect "neutral" setting, as color and white balance are relative. That said, your first K200 really had a problem, the first shot is completely green.
07-20-2008, 07:47 PM   #43
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QuoteOriginally posted by cputeq Quote
glad to see this was a simple fix I caught this thread too late, otherwise I would have told you to try the JPEG setting first.


I also have decided against using "bright" for JPEG on my K20D.

On the K200D I never really noticed a problem, but on the K20D (same settings) it was just oversaturating way too much.

I switched to "Natural" and everything was fine.
It's pretty obvious on the K200 I have now as well as the first one that the bright setting isn't going to be useable - those colors are horrible, it's a completely unusable setting in my camera.

QuoteOriginally posted by ricardobeat Quote
People's color perception varies. The new shot (as the one from the Xsi) looks unnatural to me, very unsaturated. I doubt that scene would have those colours to me in person. Maybe it fits your memory of the scene.

Neither sensors nor eyes have a perfect "neutral" setting, as color and white balance are relative. That said, your first K200 really had a problem, the first shot is completely green.
I agree about perception, but when colors are accurate, they will appear accurate to everyone; we'll both see them as we do in person. Regardless of how you percieve or see blue and how I do, if it's accurate in a photo it will appear as we both expect it should.

The reshoot is actually pretty accurate, I stood there looking at the camera's, albeit verty small, LCD screen and at the landscape, back and forth. The grass is what I was really focused on since that's where the color's so far off in the first shot and it's very true in these reshot examples. I tend to dislike over saturated colors, and as an A/V enthusiast as well I see it all the time in TVs - settings that are "over amped". The color pops sure enough but it's far from life-like, and any set I own or watch I immediately roll off brightness and color to get a more accurate picture. I like the same thing in photos, realistic, life-like color and this is getting much closer to that goal. But there's something still not right with the sky to me.
07-21-2008, 01:49 PM   #44
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center over to blue.

QuoteOriginally posted by Jodokast96 Quote
One thing I seem to find myself doing no matter what he setting is adjusting the WB from the center over to blue.
Jodokast96,

As some on this forum will know, I have issues with the way my camera captures purple as blue. After reading your post, I didn't think your post would help my problem. It didn't make sense to me that you would add more blue to make purple but after playing with photoshop, it's amazing. Things that were too blue turned more purple by adding blue hue. Hmmm, interesting.

Now to do this with the camera and experiment. When you change the blue in your WB, does that affect only the custom WB or all the preset settings also?

Last edited by bowdish67; 07-21-2008 at 01:55 PM.
07-21-2008, 05:20 PM   #45
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One final update to my saga...

I still wasn't completely happy with the color out of the K200D so I kept on digging, tweaking, and taking LOTS of shots to see if I could get to a point where I was completely happy. I think I can now say I am there. Purple notwithstanding (the camera still struggles and renders it too blue in most conditions) I have taken a couple hundered shots tweaking settings and comparing along the way, including comparing with the Rebel Xsi, and have arrived at settings that yield accurate and pleasing results (to me anyway).

In the end I have, for the moment anyway, settled on the camera set at neutral, saturation and hue both at -1, and WB fine tuning at magenta +2 and amber +2.

I'm still a bit concerned at the consistency of the camera and it's yet to be seen if results with these settings will yield consistent colors. It also seems to me like an awful lot of work to get the camera to take a decent photo and it's puzzling the default settings are so far off. As the shots above clearly show, default out of the box color is horrendous - that grass looks mustard yellow!
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