New Pentax camera?

It was back in September 2007 that Pentax signed an agreement with InvenSense Gyroscopes to provide image stabilization technology for the Optio A30 and future cameras.

http://tinyurl.com/cqcgls

Invensense provided the stabilization on the 'heli-cam' used in the BBC's Planet Earth series.

If this is to be a new model and not a K20 upgrade, it is not unreasonable to assume that we might get an improved SR system on the new camera.

Remember also that Pentax and Microsoft were cosying up to each other last summer, so if HD Video is part of the specification we might see a Pentax badged version of Movie Maker or a new Raw Editor as part of the software suite.

Steve

I sure hope that Microsoft didn't touch the software in the phone...

I for one won't buy a camera that suffers from the
"Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD)

shim

Aaah the BSOD.my fave screen (not!) lol
I only hope is that microsoft don't do the Pentax menus. Can you imagine constantly switching the camera off and on again? Oh we already do that...LMAO

Agreed, as MICROSOFT is junk, I find Lotus 1-2-3 ver 2.2 for DOS better at most things over Microsoft Excel for Vista if you understand spreadsheets and don't need graphics.

I know Microsoft are the devil incarnate, but if the Pentax name gets a big boost, and it stuffs canon, then go for it!

It would mean that big M do software for Pentax, but would that be 'IN' camera or just for the PCs. We could put up with using 3rd party editing suites, heck we already do, most of us use Photoshop in some way or other and remember how hard the earlier versions could be to operate!

It would probably mean that you could only make ONE copy of each photograph and Video and couldn't edit them. You could probably sharpen them slightly as long as you download a 350MB runtime library first. MS and any copy protection schemes in general are a total pain in the ass. I have several Sony DAT recorders that I paid a lot of money for but because of Sony copy protection (CPRMS)I can't back up any of my own tapes unless I buy Pro gear which costs thousands. Copies of commercial DAT tapes are non-existant because a blank tape costs nearly as much as a CD and because the heads are so small what plays on one recorder won't play on another, so it's not even worth buying DAT commercial recordings if they are available which they aren't. Mini disk recorders were the same made useless by copy protection. We don't need it on cameras.

I bought a Toshiba laptop a few years ago that should have been free upgraded to Vista, but MS made it so complex that it never was, which I'm now grateful to them for. Registering the XP that was on it was a total pain, I had to keep lifting it up to see the sticker underneath because MS wanted SN's and details of holes and tears...... totally unnecessary because they had already set up their sales side with Toshiba. Maybe they don't trust Toshiba. Good old Windows 98SE, those were the days

shim

Is that Windows 98 SE?

Sounds stupid but it was solid and reliable until Micrososft messed it up, I got a virus from their '98 server when XP was released!

I feel Pentax will keep the camera side separate as it won't benefit them to let another party develop a system for them. :

When the K7d, yes the new camera has a name (sort of!), appears all will become clear.

Whoops! just edited it. I still use Windows 98SE as my main computer, I have XP Media Center on the laptop and XP Pro on another desktop which I only use for photos and videos. Windows 98SE is so fast and reliable and easily repaired if anything goes wrong. Lotus Smartsuite is way faster than the MS stuff and the old Winfile Filemanager is way better than Explorer although I have the NT version running under XP. This install was done about 10 years ago and works perfecly, I've changed the HD three times and the motherboad/CPU about four times, every time it just says "Please wait while windows installs your new hardware" and then it just runs and runs. Currently Pentium 4 3200 with 1GB ram which it really shouldn't work with. I had to replace the XP Pro motherboard, but it couldn't update so I had to buy a SH motherboard identical to the one that failed and it reluctantly accepted it.

When I shut down W98SE it takes about 5 secs, XP takes ages. I've some basic photo editing stuff on W98SE, but because I copy all the cards to the XP Pro machine as well, it's better to edit on that.

I don't think they bother writing virri/trojans that run on W98SE anymore :LOL:

shim

Malware like that doesn't rely of a specific version of OS... just a few security holes in the applications and packages around the OS (like IE, imaging components, TCP/IP stacks etc).

It's hard to find AV software that works on pre W2k (though Eset used to until just now). Then there are all the TCP/IP stack issues (buffer overruns, DNS pollution attacks, etc, etc) that just haven't been fixed in pre XP.
I'd be fine if a 98 machine wasn't on the 'net... but I wouldn't connect it to the big bad wide world out there
Matt

Point taken Matt, a friend I have still uses 98SE as his OS.

He hasn't upgraded anything for 9 years!!!

Heaven knows what he'll do if he gets a new camera!

By the way wasn't there supposed to be a press release today about the new model?:

The paid version of AVG still covers W98SE and Spybot Search and Destroy still support and I have the latest TCPView running, and very often catch Google poking around when it shouldn't be, so I just kill it. If my C: drive ever got infected it would take me just one reboot to be up and running again, because I image C: to a hidden partition and by using PQBoot I boot from that partition instead of the infected one. If the boot sector gets infected I have that copied to a floppy. Must confess I still use the old free Kerio Firewall which is still very good and doesn't slow things down like modern firewalls do.

My router firewall stops any traffic from sites that I'm not connected to.

The computers very fast because it doesn't use a swap file. I can change instantly from one program to the other. On XP if I want to open a 50k text file I have to wait whilst about 2GB of memory gets shunted between the hard disk and ram.

I couldn't believe what I heard on BB2 last week. One of the computers in the studio had been running perfectly on Windows 98 for years and they upgraded it..... and it's kept crashing ever since

I wish I had a W98SE laptop XP's just a pain. I've got used to it on the other desktop.

shim

IIRC Pentium class CPUs have a design life expectancy of 10 years, so anyone running hardware that old should really be prepared for it to die at any second.

That said my Uncle has a 286 machine which has been running 24/7 controling an experiment in his lab since the late 1980s, so some machines do defy all reasonable expectations.

Your more likely to have problems with Capacitors in fairly recent boards bulging and leaking, quite a lot of Chinese made boards used capacitors made by a large manufacturer who used a stolen formula which wasn't quite the full Monty.

These were used in loads of other electronic goods that should be popping their clogs right now. I've two three and half year old Panasonic DVD recorders that have gone West. These are well known to have a problem with the power supply, but that may also be capacitor related.

The board in my XP Pro machine failed through the capacitors and the one that I replaced it with will probably only last 6 months because the capacitors are bulging now.

Links here and here and here

shim

To get back on "TOPIC", I hope all you K20D owners are going to sell on your 20's to the few of us that will never be able to afford the K7D, with all that it offers, ( I hear that it it comes with internal 1000mm lens compensation, just dial in'1000mm' and you get Hubble quality ????