There has to be more to it than that. There must be loads of people that wouldn't consider spending 400 quid on a 540, and either gravitate to Metz (£280 for a 58 AF-2, for instance), or try and find something second hand.

They don't make any money at all from those people.

Are there really many people who have to have a Pentax badge on everything and are prepared to pay a huge premium for it?

Can anyone shed any light (oops, pun) on this?

The AF-540FGZ is the same price as the K-r plus kit lens, which just seems mad to me.

I count myself incredibly fortunate to have acquired two Samsung SEF-54PZF guns, brand new from Amazon, identical to the AF-540FGZ, when they were selling them for £181.

I'd quite like a ring flash, but the AF160FC is £500.

Crazy.. why?

It's a very interesting survey, and with the FA* 24, certainly bears out the assertion that colours from Pentax lenses are richer.

Less so with the K 24, it seems, and the Kiron in particular seems to give a very blue cast.

I've heard this said often - is it the lenses, or the camera?

If it's the camera, is it the sensor, or what the camera does with the data?

Well it's superb, obviously. In terms of visible detail, it outclasses any that we've seen here recently.

There's not much information in the EXIF - would you care to share how you created it? This is a C&C thread, after all, not the gallery.

Damn!

Everyone will be doing better ones than me, now

I think it was MattMatic that first posted the technique here, so I can't take any credit for it, but I do find it works well for moons.

- Duplicate layer
- on the copy, high-pass filter and aggressive sharpening
- convert to Overlay
- adjust opacity to taste
- merge layers
- reduce size by about 10-15%
- tiny amount of USM to finish

In your case, I increased the saturation in the original layer till I could see the colours.

Here you go:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/geordie01-moon2-ca.jpg[/IMG]

It would need a bit more attention to avoid the exaggeration of the bright edge in the high pass filter, but I only spent a couple of minutes on it.

As Woodworm says, getting the colours like this is pretty good.

A bit less exposure next time might reveal the detail on the Tycho side.

By the way, I resized this to 800px... on my browser (Firefox), it gets enlarged, which makes it look worse. Click the image to open it in another tab if it does this on yours.

I would guess that the image itself as captured is actually pretty good. There's quite a bit of detail visible.

But the Lord only knows what that auto-sharpen has done to it.

Edit: if you'd like me to have a go at editing it as I did with the one in this thread, upload the unedited version.

I agree.

I'd contend your biggest problem is your workflow... here's your image after about 3 minutes effort on your unedited JPG:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/bjolester_FULLMOON_2.jpg[/IMG]