I think these can be made to look a bit better with very little effort.

I've taken the liberty of reducing the image size a bit, and applying a little USM, the result being this.

I hope you'll agree that although there's no more detail *actually* visible in this version, it appears crisper and therefore has more appeal - on a monitor at least.

It's also better than another one of yours I did the same thing to a while back (let me know if you want me to get rid of these - I didn't even remember that I still had the earlier one till I looked just now). That also looks quite crisp, but you can see that it's not quite as good - Tycho (the large crater in the bottom right corner) is a bit better defined in the one you've posted here.

And both of yours are better than mine. I definitely need to have another go...

Try it again without the teleconverter.

I tried a while back, using a 400mm SMC-A F5.6, with and without a mediocre 2xTC. Without was much, much better than with. With was awful, without was Ok, some of the time.

Bigger does not mean sharper, once you stick all that extra glass in the light path.

A knife.

No.

a) It would be too expensive.
b) I wouldn't want to go back to having to wait so long before seeing the results.

It's been very sensible up to now, but that's just crazy talk.

However, I hope you'll report back on the relative tanginess of the respective tomato sauces.

Well that's the obvious inference, but why would they leave SR on with a cable, and switch it off with a remote, given all the other situations they switch it off when the camera is effectively immobilised?

God, how many column inches would we have saved here, if only Pentax had been more specific in their instructions. A reason for their "switch SR off on a tripod" recommendation wouldn't have cost them much, would it? Grr...

I've followed this thread with some interest, and believe me, I have no reason to try to persuade you to change your mind.

However, I'm quite interested in the flash question, since I'm getting increasingly into flash myself.

The 1/180s sync speed of the Pentax dSLRs compares, as I understand it, with 1/250s with the D700. This is less than a half stop of exposure difference.

So if you wouldn't mind, please could you explain how you think this difference will make your photography different.


As for the lens question, others have already pointed out what might be a false assumption on your part. A 24-70 on a D700 will not give the same field of view as a 24-70 on a Pentax, for which you'd need the 16-50 F2.8 (which in fact, has a slightly longer reach in field-of-view terms than the 24-70 on a D700).

Exactly the same applies to the 70-200 field-of view (on a D700), which is covered by 50-135 on Pentax. If it isn't clear to you that it makes no sense to cite the absence of a 24-70 F2.8 as evidence for deficiencies in the Pentax lens line-up, perhaps this is another fundamental misunderstanding on your part.

Two years ago, it would have been a fair criticism of the Pentax lens range, but it isn't now.

This appears to be in direct conflict with the manual, then, which says:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/2009-09-05_0059.png[/IMG]

Can you explain how you established that SR was still on with the cable remote? I don't have one, so I can't check for myself.

Well that's good news...
There is that feeling of inevitability, isn't there...

Do mean 'brilliantly in comparison with earlier cameras', John?

I use the K10D wirelessly with one or two Samsung AF540s, and mostly I've been very pleased with the results - generally very good exposures, and you can use the popup either as master or controller.

The only thing I've found is an occasional trigger failure if I'm too far away, or pointing in completely the wrong direction and there's not enough light coming back to set off the slaves.