I ran the Starzen test on my K20. I used 1/4 second so as to not invoke the you can't turn it off noise reduction, and saved the file as a best quality JPEG rather than as a RAW file to avoid ACR. I had to drop the threshold for finding hot pixels to 6 before finding any. This is, on the surface, very good performance, although it is hard to say what was hidden in the jpeg conversion, and it doesn't address any firmware routines that may be hiding dead pixels as well.
The problem that DPReview is having is that they have recieved a couple of cameras which have mobile dead pixels. Dead pixels are a fact of life, having them move around the sensor from capture to capture is unique to the K20, apparently no other DSLR manages this feat, and it is considered to be a very bad thing, either a hardware problem that is badly covered up in the firmware, or else some sort of bug in the firmware. I just thought I'd pass this on to the team. For myself, hopefully it won't affect my ability to use the camera, but we should, perhaps, go a bit easier on the boys at DPReview. They have discovered quite a serious problem with the K20. William Robb -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
