Rumor has it that the lenses should be out by the end of May.
Of course rumor had it that they would be out April, and before that March. But I also heard rumors that the lenses may not actually make it here until September!!
OK, I'm not one to base my purchase totally on products that do not yet exist, but moving due dates back by six months? com'on!

I am truly disappointed in Pentax. They had some ground for real competition against other brands. By September I don't see any of the current features being competition for other brands.

Luckily I have a few lenses from my istD and from earlier Pentax cameras, but I do feel sorry for those who are new to Pentax and were planning/hoping to have a certain kit available based on marketing hype. (images of Dilbert cartoons and their marketing department pop into my mind...)

I would have to recommend you go with a cheap alternative for now. The 18-55 is not that bad. I have a hard time picking out the 16-45mm from the 18-55 except from an exact side by side comparison.

Yes, but Remote Assistant v1 doesn't handle multiple cameras and enable you to synch taking of photos with them. Version 3 handles up to four cameras. Unfortunately, at least for now, they all have to be K10Ds.

Unfortunately RemoteAssist3 won't work with my istD. Was hoping to make some nifty 3D images. Guess I'll have to trade it up for another K10D.

Anyway, works great with the K10D!!
Gotta love it! Well, at least the next time we have a thunderstorm, perhaps I can go to sleep and let the software sit for four hours until it gets a decent lighting strike!

It took a little hunting, so to save some you the trouble you may find the remote Assistant software here. (Or it could just be me, either way, hope this helps someone):

http://www.pentax.co.jp/english/support/digital/remoteassistant_k10d_win.html


By the way, if anyone gets to actually try this before I can get home from work... does it download JPEG only? Or will it work on RAW? For istD it made sense to download JPEG only, as the USB1 was horribly slow. Hopefully this will support RAW, but the docs don't seem to indicate that at all.

Hoping it will work with istD as well. Can see some potential uses for multi-camera automatically timed shooting.

Hurray!! Well, my plans for tonight have changed. I will have to have a go at this! Along with the wire-less flash, the loss of this feature was a bit of a disappointment. Having them both now really brightens my day.
I don't use tethered shooting much but when I want it, man I miss it.

Spent some time wondering that myself.

If you hit the AE-L button, this locks the exposure metering and a little "*" appears in the viewfinder. The time for which this stays locked has to do with a multiple of the metering time.

The manual is clear as mud in this regard, but I believe the metering time itself is the time from when you half-press the shutter and the exposure is determined, through the time when the display in the viewfinder goes blank at which point you again need to hit the shutter button to re-expose/focus the image.

At least that seems to be what I've seen, but it would be nice if someone has a definitive answer and prove me right or wrong.

So what they're saying is that the K10D is too powerful? Is that a bad thing?

Well, I don't know ifI'd go for that story. But I have a few lenses, some going on 10 years old.
I got my first Sigma lens (18-200mm) last year. It lasted less than 60 days before the focusing components fell apart. Still, they wanted $80 to repair. (Yes cheaper than a new lens, but should a repair fee really be charged in that time??)

I hear a lot of good things about Sigma, but I hear almost equal amounts on lenses needing to be returned for one thing or another.

Lenses with smaller apertures are going to struggle even more. If your lens will only open to f5.6 it will have a lot less light to work with than say a f2.8 or f1.4.

Someone sells a cheap little attachment with a row of LEDs that help illuminate for focusing. But I think they are on all the time, so using the pop-up flash focus-assist or the 360/540 red spotlight is probably going to give better results as they are on only while the button is half-pressed.

Hmmm, just took several hundred shots over the course of an hour last night at gig for a friend's band. I used my 50mm 1.4 lens wide open at ISO 1600 and still barely had enough light to take a decent photo. Most photos ended up with a shutter speed between 1/30 and 1/10 second (SR - what a godsend!!). FYI, firmware is 1.20.

Anyway, ended up with lots of grain, but not one showed signs of banding. OK, maybe if you knew what you were looking for, you might notice a stray line in a few of the photos. But there is nothing like I've seen reported.



Guess I'm lucky.

The conditions to make that happen much be rather difficult, or is it that some cameras suffer where some may not??
I have tried to reproduce the effect back to when I firs got the K10D, but cannot do so either.

Although if I take a long exposure with he lens cap on, there is a significant more buildup of noise on one side than the other. That is another issue yet still no significant banding effect.