Why do I have poor, grainy pictures on my new 6 mp Pentax *istDl?

Question

I recently purchased a brand new Pentax *istDL(6 mp) to take pictures of houses for realtors. I used to use a simple Kodak (4mp). The pictures on the new camera do not compare to my old one. they are grainy and not very sharp.. Is there something I am missing?.. I save in both RAW format and High res JPEG but the results are identical..I am using auto exposure to just point and shoot but the quality is poor, poor, poor.. Did I buy a piece of crap?
My kodak takes beautiful pictures with no effort.

Answer 1

Pentax wouldn't be my fist choice as a brand, but the *istDL is a great camera for the price.
The grain is probably caused by a high ISO setting. Like Sam advised, try to keep it at ISO 200 or below.
The loss of sharpness is not the fault of your Pentax at all. Your Kodak is to blame for that! Kodak point & shoots have default settings that make pictures 'pop', and they do that by over-sharpening the edges and by over-saturating the coulors to a ludicrous extent. We had a Kodak too, and the pictures were always great - but they in no way resembled the actual scene. Your Pentax is like most dSLR cameras, in that the default settings produce realistic images. If you preferred the Kodak look, you can increase the sharpness and saturation settings in you Pentax, or you can run the jpg files though an image editor and do it yourself.

Answer 2

ISO 400 film is an average film speed, somewhat like what the 50mm lens is to lenses. It should not be producing these types of results. You say the film came with the camera. This might be due to the film being older, or stored in less than acceptable conditions. Who knows how long it sat on the shelf before you picked it up? My suggestion is you pick up some new Kodak or Fuji film. Make sure the date is not expired. Also, go for T-Max film, since it will produce better results than Tri-X. If the film is not expired, I would then have to say the grain is a result of poor lighting. Once you shoot outside, and in other situations, this will become virtually non existent. If this still does not help, try going for a slower film speed, such as ISO 200 or ISO 100. This should help cut grain, but remember to compensate. One thing I just remembered, what type of lens are you using? If it is the kit lens, this is the problem. Canon has a terrible reputation of putting out poor lenses, and putting out excellent lenses. You might really consider buying a better lens. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

There's not a huge difference between 5.1-7.0 range unless you want to blow up the size of pic later on. Focus mechanism might be inferior compared to other models. Flash might be too bright/not bright enough. Or the device itself has difficulty adjusting light/shutter speed together thus causing a blur. Cheap digicam quality is very inconsistent depending on model rather than brand. Hard to tell, the market is so flooded. I'd stick to Sony or Canon.

Answer 4

Try these...The grainy picrures are results of de-focus and low light probably
-check the Exposure level on your settings, try adjusting till you get enough light
-check your ISO settings lower ISO settings will give you a clear picture if you have enough lighting
-set focus to auto and spot-focus to "OFF" , this will give you a good detail of all the objects inside your capture frame
-maybe your camera uses "Half-press" to auto-focus then "Full-press" on the trigger to take the shot.
...I hope this helps.

Answer 5

How are you veiwing them? If you print them at home, any digicam can look like crap. Take them to a photolab and have the images printed. I have 13x19 prints from my *ist D that ae gorgeous.

BTW go to here and repost this, DPReveiws Pentax SLR forums are filled with people that own that camera and can help you get better prints

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1036

Answer 6

See that your ISO is set at 200 instead of 800.

Answer 7

I have a Canon S3 IS and it is simply great. I too agree to choose Canon! However, even my S3 can get blurry when there isn't enough light, so use flash when necessary.