K5 JPEG default setting

Reading a post relevant to this earlier this week, I realised that I have never bothered to change my JPEG setting from the default 'best = 3 star' to the 'premium=4star'. I have always been satisfied with the 3 star setting and have never noticed any undue noise even when cropped and printed to A4 and above. By way of experiment today I took some photos in the garden at both settings and then examined them at a high level of magnification, but I am afraid that I failed to perceive much difference in quality. I wonder what the practice of others might be and do others find a marked difference between the two levels of compression?

JPEGs compress and approximate the information and by how much is defined by the JPEG quality setting. How much difference you will see will depend on how much detail there is in the shot and the final size you will view/print at.

Premium only halves the file size IIRC, which is not much compression, and for the highest quality results it makes sense to use it.

Hi.

I was surprised at a higher compression being the default on opening the box. You seem to have to alter it for every mode too as I found when setting up some custom 'User' settings for action, landscape, night etc.

I've found over ten years with digital (early point and shoots were terribly compressed) that artefacts creep in with compression, especially subtle dawn sky transitions as an example. Best to let the camera be as good as it can be - RAW of course does this more still. Memory is cheap so not the issue it once was for room.

Lots of hidden fine tunes. Try getting your head around priority modes bias towards speed, best aperture or best settings (MTF?) for Pentax lens attached, all poorly documented on page 102!

Of course you are both right and one should always aim at the best IQ possible, so I have changed my settings. I imagine that an uncompressed image will leave a little extra scope in post processing before any artifacts creep in. I usually shoot in Aperture Priority mode. I have always struggled to understand Page 102 of the manual, but I thought that it applied only to programmed mode, although I may be wrong.

As for storage, memory is much cheaper than it was. On the other hand when one is taking thousands of photos each year, it is amazing how quickly existing storage becomes inadequate. My PC 320GB hard disk is now too small for my image collection so it resides on a 1.5 terabyte ext hd disk which used to be backed up to an other ext hd drive which is now inadequate. Additional I back up every month or so to DVD and the number of disks required is constantly growing. I know the advantages of RAW, but I restrict its use to landscapes and to difficult lighting conditions.

Imaging Resource explain the variation in settings in Hyper Mode P and Hyprmode M(not just Green) better than I can. Very poorly covered in the manual. link

Example: I've set up a User mode fo night skies. Easier than doing it with a torch in the dark! Manual exposure with mirror lock up by remote, low ISO etc .Screen 3 of set up invites you to prioritise for Program line for hypermode.

This camera IS amazing but more complicated than many realise.

Bill, Thanks for link - yes a much better explanation than the manual. Miles