First few with the K5

I took the K5 to Villagio Mall in Doha to try it out in low light: 800 ISO seems fine, but 1600 seems to be pushing it a bit, unless I am doing someting wrong? All with the Sigma 10-20, first three 800 ISO, the last one of the canal at 1600. All taken at f8.

Skylight (not sure why some of the lines on the skylight are double)




Sunglasses




Hands




Venice in Plastic

The 'Venice' one is a bit scary - you seem to have captured the over-the-top artificiality of it well!

I like the skylight - the ultra-symmetry appeals to me. The skylight lines are puzzling. Is it an HDR capture? Some of the lines might be reflections of other parts of the window, but there are also some very thin straight lines that cross the whole picture (like 12 o'clock to 6 o'clock) which appear to be joins. Is it a fake skylight where you can see the joins in the wallpaper?

Thanks KM, yes, the mall is a bit weird, with the sky painted on the ceiling and electric gondolas!

The skylight is about the only real thing in there, unless it's such a good fake I haven't noticed! It's not HDR. I will have another look at the skylight next time I am there to see if the lines are really there: if not, my 10-20 is doing something strange.

Looks good to me AG! It's a great camera, don't stress about the ISO When I first got mine I was a bit surprised by the visible noise at ISO 1600 when zooming in on the LCD. I previously restricted my K20D at 100-400 to keep my images virtually noise-free, so all this talk of a '3 stop improvement' led me to expect noise-free images at 3200. This, as you've discovered, is not the case So for several weeks I had the K5 set to auto ISO 80-1000 in an attempt to keep noise down to the old K20D 100-400 levels.

However (big however) the noise pattern is so much more film-like compared to the K20D, that after a while I realised I was being silly. I now have it set to 80-3200, and even at 3200 the noise is not very noticeable at normal web sizes (say up to 1200x800), and at larger sizes the noise looks more like grain and is not at all unpleasant.

Edit: Oh yes, don't forget to 'expose to the right' as well.

Thanks Tim, that's put my mind at rest a bit, I was starting to wonder what all the fuss was about! Still only taken 20 shots with it, so I will experiment a bit more when I get time. It's nice it's so much like the K7 in menus etc. so no learning involved apart from how to get the best out of it!

While the high ISO on the K5 is good - it's the extended dynamic range (at least compared to a K20D) that's the killer feature for me. I find myself shooting high contrast scenes a lot and it makes a significant difference to the end product (particularly using RAW).

Tim's also right about the noise, when it's there, being much more pleasant than the K20 too.

great shots alien!!

Love the sunglasses pic

On noise .... I'm happy to stick the K-5 on ISO6400 when lightlevels require it. Lightroom's noise reduction does a great job of minimising it and only losing a little detail

You will get what the fuss is about before too long. I'm still amazed at the K-5's image qulaity. not just at high ISOs but at any ISO becuase the wider dynamic range is an amazing step up from the K20D.

I can immediately tell the difference when I go back and look through some of my K20D galleries.

The K5, ISO and noise! If you dig through the menus you will find you can custom set noise in relation to ISO, you just have to tweek things a little to get better results. However, with so many good noise reduction plugins for Photoshop you can address noise in the software stage, where you will have even greater control.

Gareth

That's disappointing to hear, Jon. I thought one of the main reasons for shelling out the best part of a thousand notes was to be able to crank-up the ISO if required and not pay the price, so to speak. Oh well, it'll stop me lusting after one, I suppose!

Pictures are pretty sound, though with great sharpness, detail and colour.

I turned all NR off in my K-5s and do it in PP

Personally I think an almost 3 stop improvement is well worth the price of the K-5. Surely you weren't expecting ISO6400 to be noise free were you?

Over expose the ISO6400 shot with roughly 1 stop and then bring the exposure back to normal level, it will have less noise this way.
If done right you can push it up to 12800 this way and still have acceptable images.

Yup as long as the scene contains no highlights you don't want clipping then absolutely!! :0

I've had a few acceptable 12800 shots

I've certainly not been disappointed at the noise performance since getting a K5 - can't speak for the K20 but the K5 is way ahead of my K10 in handling noise.
Nice pics by the way Jon.
David

Thanks for the comments, and the tips on how to get the best out of the camera. I am looking forward to getting out with the new toy again asap! What surprised me was the picture here I took at 1600 ISO lost more detail than I expected when I reduced the noise. However that could be caused by something else. I haven't had a chance to put the K5 through its paces properly yet, so need to get more pictures to see its full potential. I have no regrets at all about getting it, I was amazed how little noise there was at 800 ISO, and have been very impressed with a lot of the pictures I have seen on here. I am especially looking forward to trying it out at work, where being able to use a significantly higher ISO than with my K7 will be very useful.