That's just crazy

The whole point of locking the mirror up is to prevent the vibration from mirror slap.

So they tell you to press the button again with the mirror up to take the picture? Barking, I tell you.

By all means lock the mirror up and then use the remote, but poking the button with a finger is guaranteed to cause shake.

I'll be trying that next, once the battery's charged.

Is it just me, or do others also need a minimum of three hands to operate the K-5 and its manual at the same time?

It's thicker than a thick thing. Clearly designed to fit in its compartment in the box rather than for a user that might read it.

Thank heavens for the PDF....

Talking of the manual, I note that they're even more assertive about not using SR on a tripod than they were in the earlier ones, yet no more illuminating as to why:

[quote="p70"]Do not use the Shake Reduction function when using the camera on a tripod[/quote]I hereby serve notice that I shall continue to ignore such nonsense

Especially since they've taken away the switch and buried the command in the menus. As if I'd be any more likely to remember with it there...

I might even do some experiments in search of the only thing in the universe harder to find than Dark Matter or the Higgs Boson - a stationary Pentax with a wobbling sensor.

Apols for the poll, btw, the battery's charging so I'm bored.

I've just finished the first complete charge on my K-5. About 150 shots total, of which about 20 with flash.

Two or three minutes total in Live View and Video, and apart from that, a lot of fiddling about in the menu.

I'll have to see what the next charge is like, but once thing I noticed was that the battery indicator was going up and down all the time. From 1 bar to all three depending on what I was doing, since yesterday evening.

This contrasts with the K10D behaviour, which, from the beginning showed a full battery until about 3 shots before it died completely (which was consistent across three genuine Pentax batteries).

At first glance I thought the wreath was a chicken. The details aren't clear enough, I'm afraid - it wasn't till I saw the 'He was only 31' caption that I realised what it was.

I'm probably not the best person to comment on this - in general, I have a particular dislike for images whose meaning is only clear by reading their caption. But FWIW, I agree with George, and the idea is a good one. It's tough to photograph featureless landscapes in an interesting way.

Funnily enough, it was someone else's, which I nevertheless did drink.

It would have been rude not to, given that her 14 year old daughter had just been having a look at my K-5, and proceeded to assert that her own Canon 40D was much superior. She's a useless photographer, anyway - she took several shots of me with it, none of which made me look like the staggeringly handsome hunk that I am.

Fortunately, he who owns the SD card laughs longest, or whatever the phrase is.

I had some palpitations over this one, I can tell you.

I imported the early exposures from my K-5 into Picasa, which I use for organising photos. Here's a DNG as it appears in Picasa, and also if you upload the whole frame to Picasa web albums:

Look in particular at the top edge:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Problems/IMGP0032-fullFrame2.jpg[/IMG]

Here's a crop:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Problems/IMGP0032-crop1.jpg[/IMG]

All the shots were like this (well, all the DNGs - Picasa can't read the PEFs, and I haven't tried JPGs from the camera yet).

So you can imagine my sinking feeling..

Anyway, on closer inspection, none of the images showed this nastiness if I imported them into PSE9. On closer inspection still, the images in Picasa were being declared as 4992 x 3284 pixels, which is a bit bigger than the sensor's 4928 x 3264.

In PSE9, the image size is declared correctly - so panic over, I'm assuming it's a Picasa bug.

Anyone else seen this? It's Picasa 3.8.0 (Build 117.43,0).

Ok, second question.

Is there any reason to use PEF rather than DNG? There doesn't seem to be much in the way of filesize advantage any more.

I've had a look through this thread, and also briefly at the review mentioned, but apart from that, has anyone found any compelling reason to use PEF?

I use Picasa for image organisation, and although it insists it's the latest version, it can't handle K-5 PEFs.

Yes, I've noticed that, too, and as you say, I'm almost used to it already.

I'm also not entirely convinced that the 'slide out, click back' style of SD card cover is an improvement over the K10/20 rotating lock.

I can't help feeling that it'll wear quite quickly, and then become somewhat insecure.

Well, it's almost 24 hours since getting the K-5, and I'm pleased to report that the electronic level seems fine, the shutter release perfectly normal, and both wheels work Ok.

Also, I can confirm what others have experienced - it feels very different from the K10/20 initially, but getting used to the different feel is very quick.

I'm really liking it already, and I love the fact that it's smaller than the K10.

Clearly, the fact that the mirror flips up when he presses the shutter release means that the camera has at least attempted to start the exposure, which rules out any of the various mode/setting-related reasons for not getting a picture at all with a manual lens.

Equally, 30s is much longer than the dark frame subtraction time (which should be 2s, of course) for a 2s exposure.

I haven't got round to trying out my K-5 yet with manual lenses, so I'm not familiar with its green-button metering.

However, the legendary issues with stop-down metering with the green button on the K10D, and later on the K20D, on which the problem wasn't fixed, IIRC, does make me smell something of a rat.

What happens if you use the green button to get it to take a meter reading, and then set it to manual with the calculated exposure, and then take the picture?