Kit lens replacement

Hello Shaky, welcome to the forum!

Your advice regarding the book is perfect - as you probably discovered the manual rather assumes that you understand the basics of photography and many people stepping up from compact cameras don't! Having some sort of guide to hand when you're starting out is an excellent way of easing yourself into the hobby and you'll certainly get a lot more enjoyment from it once you know what you're doing. Not that this forum isn't a great source of info, but carrying the computer with you everywhere can get tiresome after a while...

Many thanks for all the responses.There is a lot to think about and digest there and I will do my best to do so.Particularly interesting was the information on closing down the aperture at certain focal lengths,I was misguided in thinking that brighter is better.Strangely I was in Waterstones last weekend and noticed the book Understanding Exposure but did not buy it.I will be going back to purchase a copy.I have been greatly encouraged by the help you have all offered and I will try very hard to put the advice to good use.Goodbye LBA hello ECD (Experience Collecting Duty)Thanks again all.

Thanks Hefty.
That is certainly true, but it is not my only gripe with the manual. From my own experience one of the advantages of the aforementioned book is that it prompted me to delve back into the manual – originally examined and discarded after probably less than 20 minutes of perplexed perusal – to discover how I went about performing various functions with newfound clarity of purpose.

This most recent experience confirmed my initial impression; the manual is without doubt one of the best examples I have seen of the ceaseless march towards the triumph of techno-babble over plain language, common sense explanation.

For example the section on autofocus caught my eye; to paraphrase, in AF.S you press the shutter down halfway until focus is locked whereas in AF.C you press the shutter down halfway whereafter focus becomes continuous.

To my ear locked and continuous are close synonyms, but rather than expounding on this apparently highly subtle difference the same words are instead immediately repeated almost verbatim in an important looking table, as if this information alone rivalled Einstein’s theory of relativity in imparting penetrating insight.

Not until the end of the section - and contained within a block of densely typed small print – is a difference in the treatment of moving subjects alluded to, but even this is IMO woefully inadequate.

However, it gets worse in the section on the AE-L button; “AE Lock is a function that memorizes the exposure prior to taking the picture. Use this. . . .when a proper exposure cannot be obtained.”

Hmmm: The button is used to memorize improper exposure settings. I think it is fair to say it would never have occurred to me to meter light anywhere else than the scene I was framing in a month of Sundays, and thanks to Pentax’s description of this seemingly inexplicably useless function button I would have remained in blissful ignorance of that possibility had it not been for the Peters book.

I can only conclude that the Pentax manual has been produced by honourable former samurai so disenchanted by their departure from the way of the warrior, they have elected to commit ritual career suicide by preparing documentation of such mind-numbingly banal uselessness that nobody new to this stuff is ever going to make sense of the camera, thus ensuring their customer base will eventually disappear into the void via natural attrition.

Let me guess what you do for a living
Politics maybe :
Martin.

PS, off course I agree with the quoted sentence, just kidding.

[

If you have the Schneider-Kreuznach branded lens then it's the mark 1 version... I checked the specs recently on the sammy website and the elements and groups matched the DA 18-55 mk 1...[/quote]Last time I looked there are two versions of the 18-55 on the Samsung site but the specs were exactly the same,the same as the Pentax Mk 1.
I have a Samsung branded lens not the Schneider.Really quite confusing.I rang Sammy Tech support,but they didn't know if the Samsung branded lens was different to the Schneider.That is half the reason I started this thread.Thanks all for your input.With your help I am sure I will get there in the end.

There was a press release that said two new lenses were being released at the time of the gx-20 launch, one being a upgraded 18-55 Amateur Photography. So the Samsung branded lens maybe the mark II.

You are spot on! However looking on the Sammy website, the optical formula for the new Samsung branded lens is the same as the Mk 1 DA (12 elements in 9 groups) whereas the DA Mk 2 has 11 elements in 8 groups...

That hurts

So I was right.
Martin.

Hey I was looking through my library and found the weirdest thing!

"Understanding Exposure, revised edition"
by
Bryan Peterson

What a coincidence!
(Gerri buys the weirdest things!)

I never woulda thought of that.

If I was gonna write a book...
I'd charge $50.00.
I'd call it "Indecent Exposure"
It'd have one page. printed on the back of a grey card.

Wow this is wayyyy better than my diet book idea, which was 365 pages of rice paper with instructions to eat one page per day......