Two things that really, REALLY bug me about the K10

I love this thing and I wouldn't trade it for anything else on the market right now, but here are two flaws which exist in the K10 not because of technical limitations, but because someone in the lab either intentionally thought it should function this way, or they just plain goofed badly.

1. The Raw button toggle is unreliable and not fully functional. Let's say you've set your camera to Jpg and you want to start shooting Raw+Jpg, you hit the button and there you have it. Marvelous! What a great idea this little button is! You can shoot in this mode as much as you like now. BUT if you now hit the play(► button to review your image, it disables the mode! That doesn't make any sense and it's a nuisance, because images are often reviewed after they are shot, so you have to reactivate the mode every time.

Furthermore, if you are already in Raw+Jpg via the menu, this button does nothing at all when pressed; It becomes useless. It SHOULD toggle to plain Jpg mode. That's logically what it should do.

There's no reason for this feature to be behaving the way it does. None.

2. You can not use the onboard flash in wireless mode if you do not have a modern lens attached to the body. This is a huge annoyance for me. I like to have my AF540 off of the camera body when I shoot, so I use the onboard flash as the optical trigger. BUT you cannot be in wireless mode if the camera can't use P-TTL, which is fine for some purposes, but what about us folks who like to put their off-body flash units in manual mode and don't need any metering?

I have two vintage Asahi lenses as well as an extension tube set and because of this flaw, I cannot use any of those things with off-camera lighting. All the onboard flash has to do it fire to trigger the off-camera flashguns, that's it; no metering required. So why the hell can't I do it?

I think I should ask Pentax themselves about this. I wonder what they'd say.

Have to agree with ya. Also irritating is that wireless flash is disabled when the IR remote is used. No idea why. Pentax's response was perhaps it will be enabled in a future upgrade. Now, how likely is a new firmware for the K10D to be?

It is too bad that wire less flash doesn't work with older lenses.
Anyway,if you want total manual control of the flashes, you're going to have to set them to slave2 mode. Otherwise I would assume that the camera still has to report to the flashes how brightly they need to fire. They are going to wait for that information if in slave1 mode.
With slave2 mode, you can simply slave them off any dumb (non-pttl) flash attached to the camera or via pc-sync or IR/Radio remote trigger.

You may be pleased to know that the RAW button on the K20D works as you describe. You select your normal shooting mode (JPG, RAW or RAW+JPG) then the action of the RAW button can be assigned to change to JPG, RAW or RAW+JPG so you can change from RAW+JPG to JPG.
Particularly useful if you see a pronged burst of continuous shooting coming up.
'play' button still cancels the raw button though
No good to a K10D owner I know but if its now on the K20D there's a reasonable expectation of it being on future cameras to when it comes to time to upgrade.

As Dubious Drewski says you need to change to slave mode 2 then the AF360 / AF540 will act as a non PTTL slave, just need to set manual flash on the popup too.

Good luck

Hmm, I didn't know about Slave modes 1 and 2 on my flashgun. Neat! That will be useful.

But how do I put my K10's popup flash on manual mode? I've looked and looked for that feature but never found it. Everyone I've ever talked to about it said it didn't exist as well.

But are they wrong? It would be fan-freaking-tastic if I could put my popup on manual mode! Oh God that would be nice!

Not sure this is the right answer - but something I use a lot. Do you know it is possible to adjust the output of the flash (pop-up) by hitting the fn button? Hitting the fn button and enter the flash menu you can adjust the output by the wheels. Not sure if that is what you are looking for. If you use a slave - you would be able to adjust the slave manual as well.

If you stick a manual (K / M / etc) lens on your K10D then the pop-up flash will fire without the pre-flash going off. You can dial in a certain amount of control via the Fn menu (as Nimitz says above) but you'll still need to use a bit of trial and error to get your exposures right. Good luck!

Putting the flashgun in slave mode 2 seems to allow me to use my flash as I want. This is great. I guess issue #2 is off of the list. Thank you everybody! Thank you very much!

Shoot in RAW the whole time, then No 1 won't bug you either.

G

Agree with that... but then the button becomes redundant. And I so wanted the manual white balance button of the *ist-D back (Where you hold down the button, press the shutter and the camera grabs a manual WB immediately. Brilliant for weddings with the Expodisc!)
Matt