Sorry if my analogy wasn't obvious.

If you were to take your camera to a camera supplier and they upgraded the firmware for you, it would be done by a shop employee.

The fact that they work there has no bearing on whether they know what they're doing, are careful, etc etc. So even if your camera supplier offered the service, you'd have no guarantee of a better result than if you did it yourself, other than having someone to blame if it went wrong.

You do have the skills, since you're capable of operating both a camera and a computer.

I won't bother trying to convince you otherwise any more, there's clearly no point.

My apologies too, for contributing to taking the thread off topic.

I'm not sure if we're seeing a lighter touch after the recent discussions about moderation style, but actually, there's nothing in the Ts&Cs that says you can't post non-Pentax pictures.

I mean, paragraph 2 gives the mods the right to remove anything for any reason, but the 'no non-Pentax pics' rule has been unwritten for a long time, other than in discussions and statements by mods occasionally.

And a very large proportion of us are in breach of paragraph 20

They really do need to be rewritten...

Personally, although these pictures are quite interesting, I do find their attribution quite troubling. I think passing-off (no matter how ludicrously unconvincing) shouldn't be welcome here.

Got to agree with m42, really

All the obvious horrors aside, the E string has been rendered virtually invisible, and the A string looks like it's come off a cello.

And there are only two 'n's in Paganini

Otherwise, nice shot

Erm, sorry.. you were joking, weren't you, with your reference to 'slight'??

It is a tough concept, to be fair.

He's mastered the art of posting pictures brilliantly, though, which seems to be beyond the ability of some.

Well, with respect, we have no information as to whether he did it right or not. All we know is that it went wrong. Doubtless he's sure he followed the instructions correctly, and I'm sure there's no video that can verify this. So, no disrespect to Lynton, we can't know for certain.

I know from my own general experience that sometimes, what I imagine I did isn't necessarily what the evidence shows I ought to have remembered doing

Is this the right question?

If you wrote down complete and accurate instructions, were confident that I was capable of following them, and knew me for the careful and methodical individual I often am, would you rather I followed them, or someone you didn't know who works in Curry's and is therefore 'qualified' to work with electrical equipment?

The thing is, none of us does. If a firmware upgrade goes wrong, and the camera won't switch on, I doubt any of us can sort it out without sending the camera back for service. Personally, I'd be insane to try - I can't even see how to open it up, let alone work on the innards.

Bottom line: if you follow the instructions to the letter, it very rarely goes wrong. If this wasn't true, Pentax would not supply firmware upgrades for us eejits to apply ourselves, since they'd be deluged with busted cameras to fix.

But if it does go wrong, you send the camera in, and they fix it, and it costs a bit. It is not an irretrievable situation.

My point is, the fear is disproportionate.

OMG, you too !!!!!!!!!!!!

Quite. The point is, it's fear (mostly, but not entirely unjustified), not lack of skill that is the issue, and taking it somewhere else could easily get you out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The skills required for a firmware upgrade are essentially these:

- To be able to read
- To be able to follow simple instructions one at a time, and without making mistakes

The instructions are of the nature "download file", "insert SD card", "press button", etc, none of which is any more complicated than things that anyone that uses a digital camera or a computer does all the time.

However, before you get all affronted by an implication that I assure you I am not making, it is undoubtedly the case that the consequences of doing a firmware upgrade wrong can be serious.

Accidentally stuffing up the copying of three images from a card to the computer, and turning your expensive camera into an attractive paperweight are not the same sort of thing at all, even though the skills required for each are almost identical.

It becomes an issue of weighing up the benefit of the new firmware (does it add features you need, or contain undocumented fixes for features you already have?), against your confidence in not making a mistake.

The issue is further complicated by the confidence you have in the guy in the camera shop that offers to do it for you.

Personally, I have more confidence in myself, than some random guy in a camera shop (Chris@SRS excepted), to do a firmware upgrade, or indeed go anywhere near my sensor.

Having a 'guarantee' that they'll get it sorted if it goes wrong, is all very well, but sending cameras away takes notoriously long, and they often come back in notoriously unexpected conditions too.

So there's lots to weigh up. I can understand the trepidation (and I bet there isn't a single one of us that have done loads of firmware upgrades, that doesn't look a little nervously at the progress bar every single time).

But getting someone else of dubious or at least unproven competence to do it is not necessarily the panacea you seek.

Just out of interest, what's the particular advantage of a couple of mm extra at each end, and one stop faster at the short end, compared with what's already available (WR aside)?

Eh?

Edit: aha, so it is.

I hadn't realised there was a third type, other than screw-drive and SDM.

Shows how out of the loop I've been, pre-K-5

What's the difference between DC and SDM?