In the "Something to think about." thread I opined that the D800E was likely to be in my upward growth path for more useable resolution in the type of studio shooting I'm doing lately. A few kind PDMLers suggested that the K-5 might give me what I'm looking for and sent me some RAW and high-rez JPEGs to compare against. Thank you very much, Paul, Larry and Boris!
I pulled all these images into Lightroom, made a gallery of them and some of my best in-studio (untouched) raws, closely examined eyes and eyebrows in full-body and head and shoulder portraits, and here's what I concluded. - at ISO 80 (K-5) and 100 (K-5 & K20D), the noise (or complete lack of) is indistinguishable between them. - in all cases, in full-body shots eyebrows are indistinct (read: fairly blurry smudges). No diff between K-5 and K20D. - in head & shoulders portraits, eyes and brows are sharp and well-resolved and it's very hard to say which is better, but I think the K-5 may have a very slight edge over the K20D. - the lenses being used make more difference than the two bodies. (No great surprise here.) And Boris's Sigma (whatever it is) is *sweet!* - I'll get more resolution improvement by simply using a tripod or monopod to shoot with rather then upgrading to a K-5. I also grabbed a few D800 head & shoulders portrait images from DPreview and compared. It's pretty clear that there's a large improvement in resolution, but it's also hard to see by how much. I'm convinced that the D800 shots were all done with a tripod, whereas all of mine and the loaners were hand-held. There is not an order of magnitude difference in resolution. There were no full-body, f8 or above, studio lighting D800 shots, so there was nothing for me to compare there. Final conclusion: for my work, K-5 isn't going to help much, if at all. Jury is still out on if D800E would really shake my world either. I need to investigate further -- probably rent one. I do have an acquaintance with one; maybe I can borrow that. The good news for me I don't feel so much disadvantaged by my 2008-vintage kit as I was beginning to. I'm still in the ballgame. :-) -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
