Who's got strange avatars? And what's this about aliens?
Yikes!

By the way, wasn't Pentaxian one of those arcade games from the early 80s?

I thought the point of a magnesium alloy chassis was to reduce twist and warping caused by the lens hanging off the front of the body. With lighter weight lenses I suspect it wasn't deemed a necessary expense.

I have to agree about dropping with significant impact...

An extra strong chassis doesn't affect inertia of the attached components.
Like the new Smart cars just now getting into the States -- being so small, to quell fears of an impact it is stated they "can take a 70mph impact head on".
Well sure, but the internal organs of the passengers will look like yesterday's oatmeal even if their bodies weren't quite squished into a tiny cube!


FYI, the K10D can survive a fall from about a meter with no ill effects. And that was with the rather hefty DA* 50-135 attached.
I would not test that just for the fun of it, but it happened one day anyway. ;-(

Not at all! That is a totally different program/hack and not at all related to the intended purpose of the remote Assistant!

The remote assistant simply allows you to automate some features.
It allows you to control the same features that you can access form the standard camera buttons, but from a computer.

Probably the most useful feature is to allow you to take a photo, and have it be dumped directly to the computer to be immediately viewed or edited.
Much easier than removing the card to download to the computer between every shot.

Just run it and 90% should be self explanatory.
Although reading the docs might help if you plan to attach more than one K10D or want to do time-lapse type photography.

Just a note, for me, using the timed sequential feature often resulted in the software, the computer and even sometimes the camera becoming locked up. (A simple power off/on fixes that of course.)
The whole configuration of this portion is just plain batty anyway.
So play with it a bit before you plan to do some critical work.


By the way, before you ask... no there is no way to show the captured image full screen. You can detach the preview window and make it a bit larger, but cannot resize. Matt had a program that allowed you to resize the window but the contents were just scaled. The actual resolution did not increase to fit the resized window.

he, he, was thinking along that line, but wasn't going to insult anyone by suggestion the "obvious".
Oddly it has caught me as well a few times as well... always thinking to myself that I sure hope nothing happens to break the door or switch, the whole camera would be useless!
It would be nice to be given a message 'door is a jar' or something. Even a can, a bottle, anything to let one know the door is open.

Glad ya found the answer and that it wasn't a need to send in for repair.

You can Google for answers, but I found a lot go into a lot of depth for the right timing and exposure. There really isn't much to it. Open the shutter and hold. Done.

But some tips...
- Manual focus. Find a distant object while light enough.
- F2.8 - F22 (whatever works, but F8-F11 probably a better starting point).
- Do NOT use in-camera noise canceling.
- Shoot RAW.
Use Bulb mode. Just hold down the shutter release until you get what you think will look good.

Anywhere from a half second to five seconds or even more will work.
Every shot will be different. Experiment and see what you like.
To double up on bursts, try multiple exposures. Or even a single 30 second exposure, but move a black card (or your hand) over the lens to block out unwanted effects between bursts.

Nothing to apologize for, but that is why I asked the question. I have also heard this mantra for so many years, I only discovered what appeared to be a lack of problems by accident. I also wondered if it is just certain circumstances that cause the problem to be more or less noticeable.

Anyway, that's why this forum is so great... the camera store is not likely going to tell me to buy a less profitable item.

I understand the physics of linear v.s circular polarizer to some degree (find plenty of sites explaining how those work), but if anyone knows why this affected some cameras but does not seem to affect others, I'd be interested to know.
i.e. is it simply due to cross sensors, or something else?

Has anyone had a linear polarizer interfere with focusing or metering on modern cameras? I don't seem to have any problems and have heard other people report no issues on their cameras as well.

Is this an issue that just doesn't exist any more?
i.e. is this merely a myth perpetuated to sell higher priced circular polarizers?

How noticeable is the problem? Perhaps the issue is there but not perceivable by myself.

There's no guarantee on that. I'm just offering up one suggestion that might help identify whether there was a problem or not.

But it makes sense. The histogram is going to show you the amounts of light across its available range. In a high contrast landscape you may have bright sky, and dark trees. So you may get a double-hump camelback type histogram. Or at the extreme, a bowl curving with high points each end, and not much in between.

Over water and into the sunlight, I would expect a similar readout, as it has very high contrast and the meter will have a difficult time finding any middle ground.

Although I can envision where spikes might occur at various points across the range, like I said, I would not expect sharp narrow spikes with no data in between - i.e. true combs teeth.

Unfortunately without seeing the photo or the histogram it is difficult to say what might have caused the behavior.

What was the image of? The water itself? Water with lots of bright highlights and dark areas on and between the waves?
If the camera basically read lots of distinct bright and dark areas, there may be spikes over lower broader areas in the histogram.
I would probably expect to see this more likely with a tele lens as opposed to a wide angle which would pick up more surrounding area.

Now, if there were no data between very tall solitary spikes, and the histogram actually looked like that of a modified JPG, I think that would be hard to achieve naturally and I might suspect something being wrong.