A friend is about to take the plunge into digital. She currently has a Canon film camera of some description, and two or three consumer lenses. Her two daughters each have a 40D with a kit lens.

From what I know about her likely budget, I'm suggesting she looks at a few cameras in the K-5 price/spec bracket.

So what would be the nearest thing to a K-5 in the Canon and Nikon worlds?

From what I can see at a cursory glance of specs, it would be the 60D and the D7000.

Would that make sense?

I'm having the same problem - a K-5 AVI won't import into Premiere Elements 9.

The error message, as Rob found, is "This type of file is not supported, or the required codec is not installed."

Installing Quicktime didn't fix this for me, but the Morgan one did.

I don't think anyone is saying anything in particular about the relative qualities of the two 18-55s.

It's more about what the OP needs to do to improve the appearance of his pictures, which is probably more complicated than "get a sharper lens".

There are any number of things that might be contributing to an unsatisfactory image, from simply being too far away and expecting too much of a 100% crop, to not making the most of the editing process.

We need to know more, really, so an example image would be good. Ideally, the full frame, and a 100% crop of the bits that don't seem to be sharp enough. As well as how the photo was taken, and its EXIF.

Without that, it's speculation really, as to how to fix it.

Having handled one now, I'm with Mike. I hope they sell loads to pro studio type togs, since I want the brand to do well generally.

But I have no aspiration to own one. It was good to note that despite its size, it still felt like a Pentax, and hence was very easy to use, but my arms were aching by the time I'd played with it for a few minutes, it was slow to focus even with the standard lens, and even though it's cheap for a MF and has 10% off at the moment, it's price tag is mental.

Cool, but daft for most people's purposes, in reality. There's a reason it has two tripod sockets - it's because it needs them.

The K10D manual was all in one language too. About 50% bigger in length and width, and a shade more than half as thick. If you're happy to crack the spine and graunch it open, the K-5 manual is Ok, but I have a complete neurotic phobia doing that to books.

As manuals go, the K-5 one is fine for content. As PDF, searchable, and easily scrollable, it's much better than the printed version, although the latter is more convenient in the smallest room.

Well worth a read, too - there's all kinds of stuff in it you'd likely never come across.

Yes, this is exactly what people find. From not too bad at large apertures, to horribly overexposed at small ones.

There's simply no way round it with the K10. Calculate your own exposures in manual, or get rid of the Ms and get As (or later).

I've yet to find out if it's fixed on the K-5, but I don't have many manual lenses left, so for me it's not much of an issue.

I think it's why it's so easy to pick up M series lenses for next to nothing - optically the Pentax SMC M lenses are excellent, they just don't have the convenience factor.

By the same token, the equivalent A-series lenses will cost a lot more, and retain their value, since they have the same great optics, and all the auto-exposure modes work just fine.

If it does, it will be the biggest corporate cock-up they've made to date.

They really can't afford to get Windows 8 wrong if they want to maintain their OS dominance as the tablet revolution continues.

The 'alternate release Ok' theory, although very well-known, isn't really the whole story.

Windows 7 was much more of a rebranding exercise than anything else - it was more of a service pack for Vista than a whole new OS. It's great now, though.

Yep

If you look at the camera from the front during the exposure (you might need to set it to manual and pick a long exposure to see it), you'll notice that the aperture does indeed stop down to whatever you set on the aperture ring.

However, that is while the shutter is open.

The metering takes place before the exposure, and this normally takes place with the aperture wide open. So you can set it to whatever you like, and the exposure the camera picks will still be based on a wide open aperture.

What Doug says is exactly right - the green button tells the camera to stop the lens down to the set aperture and take a meter reading, and pick a shutter speed based on the amount of light it measures.

This is great in theory, but sadly it doesn't work right on the K10D, nor the K20D I believe.

You'll find that (IIRC) the more you stop the lens down, the more overexposed the result is, even using the technique Doug describes.

The only way of using a K or M lens is in manual - meter wide open, and then calculate the shutter speed yourself for your selected aperture.

It's a pain - I got rid of all my M lenses once I knew about this problem.

A-Series lenses are no problem at all, because (when set to A), the camera can set their aperture just before the exposure.

So the camera still meters wide open, but because the camera knows what the aperture is going to be (because it's setting it), it can calculate the correct exposure, rather than attempting to measure it by stopping the lens down.

Note that even A-series (or FA for that matter) lenses will behave like K or M lenses if you don't set them to A.

SR is also turned off in wireless flash mode, I've just discovered.

It's also true with the K10D, something I've not noticed in more than four years!

Why on earth would that be?

If you're using a long exposure, long enough to benefit from SR, and choosing to use some fill-in flash, why would it make any difference to the SR whether you used the flash wirelessly or not?

Seems a bit arbitrary to me

Terrific. Is there any more detail available in the clouds in the lower half? It would be nice to see just a little more of them, I think.