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.

With the noise reduction system turned off to maintain maximum image detail, the K2000 stays essentially even with three of the other cameras tested, spiking a bit higher at ISO 400 but coming in lower than the others at ISO 3200, where it maintained a very respectable noise level of just 1.75% average color noise and nearly the same in luma. The outlier here is the Olympus E-30, which proved disturbingly noisy in our lab tests.

With the noise reduction cranked up to maximum levels, the spike at ISO 400 which we saw with noise reduction off is more pronounced than with the other cameras in our testing, but overall image noise remains well under control. As seen in the chart below, the Pentax K2000 holds its own against the competition here.

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.

ISO Comparisons
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO Low
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 100	ISO 100	ISO 100
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 100	ISO 100	ISO 100
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 200
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 400
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 800
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 1600
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 3200
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 6400
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30
ISO 12800
Pentax K2000	Nikon D90	Canon EOS 50D	Canon EOS Rebel XS	Olympus E-30

NOTE: The images above are not used in our testing or scoring, but are included here to show real-world examples of the differences between cameras at the various ISO settings.