No it wasn't.

No it's not, it was a question. If you're not going to even read what's written before answering, it's not going to be much of an argument, is it?

Is this thread going to go on for just five minutes, or the full half hour?

Yep.

It's the sensor sliding from side to side. There's a slight noise when it slides, and a faint thud as it reaches the limit of its movement.

All the Pentax dSLRs with shake reduction do this, as far as I know. Completely normal.

Ok, here's one...

I think this picture is good enough to be well worth having another go at the cloning in the area around the head, possibly on a brighter monitor than it was done on originally.

There's no other explanation I can see, than simply that the monitor couldn't show the obvious difference in the blue of the sky, and the blue under the beak, or indeed the 'shockwaves' in the air above it.

Seriously - I edited a lot of my early K10D pictures on an old CRT monitor, and was truly shocked when I saw them on the LCD that I use now.

Sometimes I wonder if I perceive an element of this, but I'm not sure. I'm not good enough either as a digital or film photographer to judge really.
Digital sensors do not yet have the dynamic range of film, so it is not yet possible, even theoretically, to get a picture with as dark darks and light lights as it was with film and paper, at least not with only one exposure.

So I don't think JR's assertion in relation to the potential quality of an actual darkroom print (created by the right pair of hands and eyes) was unreasonable.

Actually, the file comes as a self-extracting executable, which you have to run*.

When you run it, it asks you for a folder to put the extracted files into, and then you end up with a file called FWDC162B.BIN.

It is this .BIN file you put in the card's root folder prior to switching on for the update.

It also gives you a readme.txt file with detailed instructions.

____

* Edit: that is, assuming you got it from here

Not me.

I improved enormously after I went digital. No comparison whatsoever... I have a very few pictures from my film era that I'm quite pleased with, but not many as a proportion.

For me, it's the instant feedback. I've learn a lot from the mistakes I make, and having to wait (sometimes weeks) before seeing the results meant that I forgot a lot of what I'd done to make the mistakes in the first place.

Yes, I know I should have taken notes... but I was never disciplined enough. Thank heavens for EXIF... roll on auto-GPS tagging

Indeed. This is a Typhoon, as is this.

The one in the first five shots is an F16, belonging to the Belgian Air Force.

Black every time for me. In this day and age, I want my camera gear to be as inconspicuous as possible - already quite difficult with its size.

It's for taking pictures, not making a fashion statement.