New Pentax owner saying hello

Hi all, thought I would say hello.

I joined earlier in the week, read some posts, rang SRS, ordered my K20D which arrived yesterday.
The advice from this forum was spot on, and yes I did plug the forum and get free postage!

First impressions of the K20 are very positive.
Features offered on this camera seem to surpass all the other manufacturers at this price point. I'm currently in a transitional phase between my Minolta gear and Pentax, although I fully expect to retain some of my old favourites.
When I've sold some of the Minolta glass I will indulge in some Pentax equivalents as I only have the 55-300mm at the moment to use on the K20D.

A couple of decisions to be made pretty soon are regarding a new SD card and RAW conversion software.

SD(HC), I currently use a Sandisk 2gb Extreme III CF card in the Dynax and will probably go for an SD version for the Pentax. With the increase in sensor size on my new camera I guess an increase to 4gb would be a good idea.
Is SDHC a big improvement over plain SD?

RAW converter, I predominantly shoot RAW and use RawShooter or Phase One (v3.7).
Neither of these seem to read the PEF file, or is this just the K20 version?

Regards,

Ian.

Hi Ian and welcome to the forum. i'll leave the technical stuff to the experts

Welcome to the fora. I, too, will leave the techie stuff to those who know as I haven't used those RAW converters. Meantime, could you use DNG format instead?

Best wishes, Kris.

Hello Ian, and welcome.

This has obviously been a good move for Pentax then, it seems people are now buying a Pentax and joining this forum to save a few pounds

Well I suppose we can forgive Ian, he is after all a Yorkshireman (at least he would be if they didn't leep shifting the borders and renaming stuff:wink

Welcome to the forum Ian, I dont think you'll find much difference between the SD and SDHC cards until you shoot in burst mode or try uploading a 4gig card full. For the K20D a 4 gig card would be a good idea though.

As far as Capture One v3.7 is concerned, it doesn't support the K20D's PEF files, but it does work (very nicely) with the K10D. You should be able to upgrade to v4 of the software, which does support the K20D, but that version has a very different feel, and I prefered the 3.7, so have stuck with that. Fine with my K10D, obviously not with your K20D.

Welcome, by the way.

Dan

Hi and welcome

Hi Ian,

Welcome to the forum
With regard to RAW converters I use CaptureOne 4 Pro
http://www.phaseone.com/4/ (I've recently upgraded from CaptureOne 4). I find it to be an excellent converter very easy to use with nice work flow capability. It seems to be particularly good at extracting every last detail out of RAW files and the highlight recovery feature is useful too. Another worth trying is RAWTherapee http://www.rawtherapee.com/index.php?mitem=2 again a very capable package which is donation rather than payware. Both work very well with the K20D but for me CaptureOne 4 edges it.

Hi Ian,
Welcome to the forum.
To answer your question about Rawshooter not reading your K20d PEF files.
A while ago Adobe has taken over Pixmantec and there fore Rawshooter.
They implemented all the good stuff Rawshooter had, into Lightroom.
So, if you splash out $200, your in business again

Martin.

Hi Ian welcome to Pentax, I always use an 8GB SDHC class 6 card as I use Raw+ for my K20D and 4GB class 6 for my K200D, as for software I use ACDsee Pro 2.5 it has raw converters for nearly all dslr's it can automatically put the raw files in one directory and jpg in another and it has all the manipulation you will need and it's relatively cheap. you can download a free trial.

Jack

Hi Ian and welcome to the forum

Hello Ian and welcome to the forum

Hello Ian
Welcome to the forum

Welcome Ian.

Rawshooter is a dead product, Adobe bought the company (Pixmantec) for their technology and incorporated it into their own product, Lightroom, which is now at version 2.2.

If you bought a full copy of PhaseOne's CaptureOne LE V3.x software, they include one free version upgrade so you could move up to V4.

Both Lightroom and CaptureOne LE V4 can deal with Pentax PEF's from your K20D.

A relatively inexpensive alternative to these two is Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Thanks for all welcomes and replies.

I've tried upgrading my old version of PhaseOne's Capture One (3.7.7) to 4 but it refuses to so I downloaded v4, does not look like my oldish computer will run it!

I've decided to find a stop-gap alternative until I can afford a new PC seen as I've emptied the piggy bank on a K20D!

I guess it will be a 4gb sdhc for the card.

Again, thanks for the warm welcome.

Ian.