Originally posted by jgredline Now I do not shoot RAW and all the K-7 excuses I hear say..That is why..Well maybe so, but why do my other Pentax DSLR's produce better results?
The advantages of RAW for low light or high contrast scenes are pretty huge. If you care about noise at all, then RAW data + a properly calibrated and fine-tuned noise reduction tool will give you much, much better results with any camera. Why would you not shoot RAW? It's like throwing away film negatives - you irretrievably lose very useful data.
The K-7's JPEG noise reduction might be designed for the user to then apply their own NR, or maybe it's just not that great - this is a disadvantage, for sure, but I personally would not be put off by a camera which did not produce JPEGS at all. Most everyone who says the K-7 is noisy is talking about the JPEG engine and not the performance of the sensor - these are two very different issues.