I had not heard of that before. The fact you cannot turn off dark frame subtraction is truly awful. Even for rather "normal" types of photography, the user must end up "randomly" being unable to take the next photo because the camera thinks the image needs noise reduction.

What if I prefer a bit of noise to missing critical shots?
That is truly unacceptable. I am glad this was mentioned because I will watch for this feature. It will certainly keep me from buying any future Pentax camera that lacks the ability to turn that off.

I have to agree and don't see what these two different groups could be or how they would differ. Beginners generally do not use RAW. More advanced users do. I don't see where I would want to edit in RAW and not have the one or two added features such as spot removal.

Ichikawa seems to have some strange ideas on pricing and licensing anyway. People have been questioning (complaining?) about such things as moving from Windows to Mac or vice verse, and having to buy a whole new license... others allow free conversion or at least decreased pricing.
They have the right to price as they wish, of course, but it just seems to be less friendly than some other companies that many are used to dealing with.

BTW Prieni,
A few hours after the contest results were posted, the forum was closed with the results posted for viewing only. A day later the forum was completely removed from any access.
A few of us have been complaining about the spammers getting past their security so I think thy were trying to make that more robust. Although I honestly think they are taking way too long... just as they did for the contest!
I don't think the website is high on their list of priorities.

I use it for the K10D. I would assume the only difference is the added camera option. I have not read of any additional features for the version that comes with the K20D.

In general I love it for studio work, where I can immediately show the client the result. Once case I had to photography a woman's paintings for printing. I would not have a chance to come back and re-do the shot so being able to see each image right away was invaluable.

You can even set up software such as Lightroom to detect new images being dumped into a specific folder then view and edit immediately without having to import a batch from the card.



Sadly, beyond that, Remote assistant is only a nice toy.
It has settings for time lapse style photography, but it is not stable enough to handle that sort of workload.

I tried setting it up to automatically photograph skies for capturing lightning. Clicking 15 second exposures for two hours by hand gets painful and tedious.
Remote Assistant crashed four times, froze six times, cause my K10D to lock up twice, failed to complete downloads of all but two photos.
I spent almost all of my time fixing and debugging problems.
I tried all different timings to make sure I didn't overlap images, tried to space them out, tried shorter times, longer times, etc...
The software in this area is just crap.

Again, for single shots it seems to work well. Just be sure to play with it and see if it will do what you need before you risk making a fool of yourself in front of a client.


One side note, no there is no way to view the image larger within the RemoteAssiatant. OK, there is a hack but it simply enlarges the image. It does not increase resolution... i.e. you get larger pixels, not more
pixels. Therefore if you have software light LightRoom that can view the images in proper dimensions, that makes things so much nicer.

Ditto on the 55-300mm.
Fabulously sharp at 300mm. Not terribly fast, obviously an F2.8 would be dreamy, but for what I do this lens does not leave me feeling like I need anything more.

If your PC had Vista when you bought it, it seems few people have major issues. It appears to be that installing Vista on any machine on which it wasn't already installed, is a cause for major headaches.

My laptop is Vista compliant, but still had XP pre-installed. When my Vista was released a month later and installed, it was a nightmare. Three days trying to get it to actually install! I spent another week hunting down information on how to get the internal USB card reader to work. Then another week getting the K10D to be detected for tethered shooting.

Whenever it wakes up from hibernate mode, the RETURN key gets "turned off".

I don't know who finds Vista to be faster, but it sucks up so much memory and resources for background tasks (4G machine) that everything is slower than it should be. (and I've stripped all optional add-ons that come with PC these days).

Unless you NEED Vista, I would say hold off for Windows 7. It sounds promising. Even the current beta is getting decent reviews, including its stability. (Could Microsoft actually have learned from NT4 Sp2&SP4, Windows ME, and finally Vista?? doubt it, but will be fun seeing what happens)

Just installed ABP (AdBlock Plus), WOW! Very nice. Thanks so much for the tip!

Yes. I'm not sure of the best focal lengths but other factors likely affect this such as time of day, amount of clouds, etc...

It is probably best to remove the filter if the effect becomes undesirable. Also important to remove if you're making panoramas from multiple images that include large swaths of sky, regardless of lens focal length. (since the issue comes from the difference of viewing angles from the location of the light source - the sun).

There is Circular and Linear polarizer. The type of polarizer should not have much effect on the end result.

If you think about it, since a polarizer has the most effect at 90 degrees from the light source, the effect will decrease as you change your viewing angle away from that point.

If you center your camera with the sky such that it is 90 degrees from the sun, the center will be getting the most effect of a polarizer. As the angle changes (i.e. as the view extends towards the outer edges of the frame), the effect of the polarizer decreases. Thus the darker band in the middle.

This effect will be greater with wider angle lenses as the edges of the frame extend further away from the 90 degree mark.

Unless you were using a longer focal length (i.e. smaller viewing angle therefore less sky visible), or if you were at a different angle to the sun (most polarization effect seen when at 90 degrees to sun), the effect should not change with digital cameras.

What you describe would not be an unexpected behavior with a polarizer used on a wide angle lens.

Another possibility would be that your new polarizer is of higher quality and is giving a greater effect than your old one.

DNG is uncompressed so the resulting file will be larger than PEF.
You can use a converter to create (or I suppose, recompress) the DNG file in compressed mode. But from the camera, DNG is uncompressed.

Other than that, no real downsides to either, as far as I'm concerned.