{"id":4303,"date":"2011-09-25T09:16:08","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T16:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/?p=4303"},"modified":"2011-09-25T09:16:08","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T16:16:08","slug":"pentax-q-high-iso","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/?p=4303","title":{"rendered":"Pentax Q high ISO"},"content":{"rendered":"

While playing with the Pentax Q I allowed myself to mostly\u00a0forget about the technical and pretend that I don’t know much about photography.\u00a0 Some\u00a0might argue that would be quite easy, but taking this position allowed me to experience the Q how I think it is intended.\u00a0 Pentax seems to have broken most of the rules that have governed digital photography.\u00a0 The last ten years have seen incremental advancements in technology making each new camera slightly better than the last.\u00a0 With the Q Pentax\u00a0appears to have said OK things in the world of cameras are pretty good lets start over.\u00a0 What I mean by this is that as people are agonizing over whether to choose a camera with a slightly smaller sensor to get a smaller camera, Pentax has just said forget about the sensor size you want small this is what it takes.\u00a0 Nikon has done a similar thing with their new 1 system cameras the j1 and v1 and used a sensor much smaller that APSC but which is still 4 times the surface area\u00a0of the Q’s sensor (116mm vs 28.5mm).\u00a0 The Internet is rife with information and arguments about how sensor size affects high ISO low light performance so I won’t bother with that but just present where the current state of the art appears to be, all be it in a very tiny camera.<\/p>\n

So here are some examples of the high ISO performance with details, I haven’t applied any luminance noise reduction to the images but have left the color noise reduction of Lightrom at the default 25 for the RAW files.\u00a0 I also haven’t done any distortion correction correction to the RAW images.<\/p>\n

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ISO 1600 f3.5, 1\/40 sec RAW and a 1 to 1 crop<\/p>\n

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This one was shot as a jpeg with no further processing.\u00a0 ISO 3200 f2.5 1\/60 sec, and the 1 to 1 crop follows<\/p>\n

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ISO 6400 f4.5 1\/60sec RAW again no luminance noise reduction applied and the 1 to 1 crop<\/p>\n

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So what are my conclusions from what has to be admitted as a very short 3 hours with the camera.\u00a0 It’s smallness defines it.\u00a0 I don’t think that I was able to show how small it is through pictures which seems odd.\u00a0 You would think you can just put it beside something of a known size and there you are, but it isn’t quite that simple.\u00a0 It changes the measuring stick of small.\u00a0 I’m not entirely sure how to define this camera because there is a trade off with the size and I think that is in\u00a0the absolute image quality.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps I’m not able to pretend hard enough to let the tech geek in me forget about the image files and only see the pictures.\u00a0 I’m not sure that the Q will attain main stream acceptance but I’m also not sure that was what Pentax was going for, the build quality of the Q is extremely high and it just looks cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While playing with the Pentax Q I allowed myself to mostly\u00a0forget about the technical and pretend that I don’t know much about photography.\u00a0 Some\u00a0might argue that would be quite easy, but taking this position allowed me to experience the Q how I think it is intended.\u00a0 Pentax seems to have broken most of the rules […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,6,1],"tags":[366,52,223],"class_list":["post-4303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cameras","category-photography","category-uncategorized","tag-cameras","tag-pentax","tag-q"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4303"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4303"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4318,"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4303\/revisions\/4318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}