Pentax K2000

Noise Reduction (6.50)

It doesn’t take an engineering degree to figure out the point at which the camera design team decided to enable noise reduction. The three noise reduction settings are arranged in a useful pattern, allowing the careful photographer to effectively balance the lowering of noise with the inevitable resulting loss of image detail.

The noise patterns are very consistent across all five component parts, red, green, blue, yellow and luma (gray), which is good: a spike in any individual area would be more visible than a tightly clustered color pattern. More on how we test noise.

The Pentax K2000 fared very well in our image noise testing, producing nice clean photos with minimal speckling and imperfections, even at high magnification. This test is conducted with a brightly illuminated color chart, but the strong noise performance is echoed in our long exposure tests, which were shot under dim 20 lux lighting. For more information about our image noise testing process, see the How We Test section here.

The Pentax K2000 offers four levels of High ISO noise reduction: off, weakest, weak and strong. This is a very strange naming convention, and potentially confusing since ‘weak’ is actually a fairly strong setting.

ISO Options

The Pentax K2000 offers an ISO range from 100 to 3200. The Auto ISO mode is a bit more sophisticated than most. Users can specify the upper limit of acceptable ISO settings in Auto ISO mode, which can be set as low as ISO 125 or as high as ISO 3200. By default, the camera shoots in Auto ISO mode with an upper limit of ISO 800.

Focus Performance

The K2000 uses a five-point autofocus system, which is less flexible than higher-end SLRs. When shooting, we found autofocus speed was a bit sluggish but adequate for most shooting situations. Shooting sports, though, could be a challenge.

The Pentax K2000 does not have a dedicated autofocus assist lamp. Instead, it uses a high-speed series of pulses from the built-in flash; very effective in helping the camera focus, but not perfect if you had some candid photography in mind, or pictures of a sleeping baby.

There are two autofocus point settings. Wide allows the camera to choose the AF point from the five available, while Spot sets the AF point in the center of the screen. There is no option to select an autofocus point manually, as found on some SLRs, but of course you can always spot focus on the subject and maintain that reading by holding the shutter halfway down while recomposing your shot.

Long Exposure (8.44)

Our long exposure test combines two significant factors when shooting in low-light environments at slow shutter speeds: color accuracy and image noise. Based on its so-so performance on our color test conducted under bright lights, it comes as no surprise that the K2000 lagged the competition in this aspect of our long-exposure test as welll. When it comes to image noise, though, the Pentax did very well here, maintaining image noise well below 1.5% across all five shutter speeds we test: 1 second, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds and 30 seconds. More on how we test long exposure.

As we often find, long exposure noise reduction proved ineffective, and even slightly harmful, in our tests. Noise is inherently random, but long exposure noise reduction systems are designed to take two consecutive shots and remove the noise patterns found in the second (taken with the shutter closed) from the first. With random patterns, this approach is understandably ineffective.

As with our core color accuracy testing, the Canon Rebel XS leads even its more expensive rivals in our long exposure testing, though the Pentax delivered respectable performance.