Pentax K-7 High ISO NR

Pentax K-7 High ISO Image Quality

The Pentax K-7 offers four high-ISO noise-reduction settings, allowing you quite a bit of flexibility in choosing how you want to make the trade-off between subject detail and noise levels. Settings available are "Off ", "Low", "Medium" (default), and "High". See for yourself how the noise reduction works under daylight lighting. Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image. For reference, we've include low ISOs (100-800), where no high ISO NR is applied. (The Pentax K-7 is quite unique in that it lets you program at what ISO High ISO Noise Reduction starts. Options are ISO 200, 400, 800, and 1600. The default is ISO 800, which is what we used.)

The above crops show the effects of the four levels of High ISO Noise Reduction available on the Pentax K-7. The default setting is "Medium", but to our eyes it's a bit strong, so we're glad Pentax included "Low" and "Off" settings. Interestingly, the setting has a more subtle effect at ISO 6,400.