Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Testing K10D and K100D Shake Reduction

Quick and dirty test to evaluate how SR performs with the K10D and K100D. Lots of people are asking me about SR performance and I wanted to provide a bit more than just my suggestive evaluation.

I used the Pentax DA 50-200mm for this test. For reference, I also added 3 shots from Nikon D200 with Nikkor AF-D 80-200mm f/2.8 (obviously, no SR).

All shots were hand held (duh!) and taken at 200mm ISO 400 f/8 and around 1/5s. Yes, it's over 5 stops below the minimum recommend shutter speed!

I took exactly and only 3 images with SR OFF followed by exactly and only 3 images with SR ON. I didn't discard any image.

In short: SR works great and has been improved in the K10D over that in the K100D, as claimed by Pentax.

(click on the image to see it full size)

2 comments:

RiceHigh said...

Good test! Simple, systematic and objective.

From the results, it shows that SR in K10D works more effectively than that of the K100D and with SR, it is surely better than without SR, for both the K cameras themselves or compared against the D200.

The SR is not totally eliminating all the shaking blurs, though, especially for the case of K100.

But actually, at 1/5s, it is actually not 5 stops slower, it should be 6 stops! (take also the 1.535X focal multipler into account!)

BTW, the photos from the D200 look out-of-focused to me, too, in addition to the shaking blur.

Anonymous said...

Although the K100D SR on images are not as sharp as the K10 SR ON images, the K100D SR OFF images are blurrier than the K10D SR OFF images. Perhaps becuase the K10 is bigger and heavier?

Either way, this suggests to me that its not the SR that causing the extra blurriness, but the relative lightness of the K100D

What do you think?