One final (hopefully :blush thing on the "does this thing work or not" subject, which might hopefully also be useful to other potential K-5 purchasers.

At risk of annoying our friend Chris, if I took a laptop and an SD card into SRS (not on a Saturday afternoon, obviously)...

... what should I check on my shiny new K-5 and 18-135 to save me the annoyance of a return trip?

Sensor stain, electronic level... possibly the low light AF...

Anything else?

Yes, I take your point.

The idea in my mind was to distinguish between those that don't push their equipment to the limits of what it can do, and hence don't encounter its problems, and those that do.

Even the sensor stain problem could be argued (not by me, mind you) to be relatively minor, since just like sensor dust, it's often not visible, and when it is, it's easily cloned out. Without the service of those that look closely for such things, and the publicity from internet forums, would many that returned their K-5s have found the sensor stain problem for themselves?

With the K10D, I put up with the exposure system simply not working right with pre-A lenses, for the sake of all the other things I liked about it. I found workarounds, and I got rid of all my M-series lenses. I'd argue that was both a design flaw, and also a fault - something not working right (or even as described).

I accept I'm blurring the distinction between a fault and an intrinsic limitation, but the two are often not that easily separated.

I've been following the various 'gear not working right' threads with a bit more interest recently, since I'm now quite close to taking the plunge and getting a K-5.

Many of them make for quite depressing reading, and have put me off lashing out the grand or a bit more for the body and something to stick on the front of it (I'm thinking of the 18-135).

Is it just my imagination, or are there really quite a lot of people out there that have a camera that has one feature or other simply not working right, but just put up with it?

Hence the poll... how do people feel about niggles in their new kit?

I realise that people's answers will depend a lot on the perceived seriousness of the issue (sensor stains for instance, vs electronic level)

They'll also depend on the nature of the things we shoot. At one end of the spectrum, just to pick one example that comes to mind, it seems to me that JR rarely shoots anything moving, and never has any complaint whatsoever about the performance of Pentax kit. At the other end, Mike-P who (like me) likes photographing aircraft, sometimes (like me!!) seems driven to distraction.

Even so, I'd be interested in the results of this admittedly non-scientific survey.

There's no doubt that in an overexposed image, especially when it's so overexposed that the highlights have started to clip*, you'll lose detail, so it won't be as clear.

But you won't lose detail if you expose as much as possible to the right of the histogram, provided you don't start clipping the highlights.

It's better to reduce the exposure on the computer than in the camera, if what you want is a slightly less bright image that lets you see the detail in the bright bits (especially on some very bright monitors). This will give you more latitude to selectively bring up the shadow areas if you need to.
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*if you don't know what clipping means, I'd *really* recommend reading something like this and also this.

Noise also tends to be a lot worse when, as well as using high ISO, you additionally underexpose the image.

Inevitably, it's the featureless shadows that end up the most underexposed, and that's where the noise will be most obvious.

You might take a look at the histograms for some of the examples you're referring to, and see if you could have given them a bit more exposure.

Exposing to the right (and shooting RAW) will give you the best chance of minimising the noise at any ISO.

Looking at it again, I started to think I'd been a bit aggressive with the contrast, so I started from scratch.

This time I went for a slightly looser crop and also reduced the noise in the background. Not that the NR has made much difference at this size, though the difference was quite apparent at the original size.


[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Public/IMGP3075-3.jpg[/IMG]


Which version do you prefer?

Most kind. Yes, they're rarely still for more than a couple of seconds. I have a family of four occasionally visiting the feeder I have set up outside my window, and if I'm lucky they play in the tree a little. Usually they're either gone by the time I can bring the camera to bear, or they're in the middle of the tree with twigs obscuring them.

It's an edited RAW file. I cropped it and then adjusted the levels a little, increased the contrast and saturation a little, and after reducing to 800px wide applied a little USM.

That's about it - the noise in the original wasn't excessive, but seemed less obvious after resizing, so I didn't try to reduce it.

Haven't posted anything for a while, thought I'd see what people thought of this:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Public/IMGP3075-2.jpg[/IMG]

Taken with the '10 yesterday, with the 55-300. It was a bit dark - I haven't done anything to reduce the 800 ISO noise. 1/180 at F8.

An unqualified yes from me too.

Before I calibrated mine (Huey Pro), prints I got back from places like PhotoBox were terrible - way too dark, since my monitor was way too bright.

Since then I've been a lot happier with prints, in particular with a photo book I did using Blurb.

Considering the effort it took to edit the 30-odd photos and arrange the book, the 70 quid secondhand I spent on the Huey was nothing.

Indeed. Yet with digital, they've come back!!

I had to sit through my brother-in-law's several hundred snaps from his China trip recently.

With commentary.