I do find this whole thing very puzzling.

Does anyone know why, if it's so easy to adjust, so many cameras arrive at the shop adjusted wrong? Is it simply sloppy QC, or is there a more subtle reason for it?

Secondly, why is it different for different lenses?

And there I was, thinking that I was more or less sorted, lens-wise.

If the QA questions really have been laid to rest, it's the next on my list.

Ah. Understood.

I can understand any reluctance to use the Russian Program to achieve the same thing while still with 1.30.

I must admit, it was not without concern that I downloaded and ran the Russian Program - I installed it first in a Virtual PC, virus-checked it and had a poke about with its buttons, documented as far as I could find.

This gave me the confidence to try getting into the Debug Menu with my K10D, although I didn't change anything.

I felt on balance, that it was less of a faff to use the Russian Program, than go to all the trouble of hacking the 1.1 firmware to make it look like 1.3, installing it, and then reinstalling the real 1.3.

Why on earth should the validity of my opinion of your photo be influenced by your opinion of mine?

As I said, if one had to be Ansel Adams before being allowed to express a subjective opinion, almost no-one would dare to say what they like and don't like.

You can find my photos if you care to look. One or two of them you might like; all of them have room for improvement, and I'm grateful to any that take the trouble to express an opinion.

John is a master of tact.

It's not one of my greatest skills, and I bow to him, as always, in that respect.

However, I would politely point out that it isn't the nicest thing to say, effectively, "your opinion is worthless because a magazine reviewer has told me that my picture is good".

If you disagree with my point that your tiger is oversharpened, why not just debate it? If you take exception to my referring to it as unnaturally spiky, why do you care enough to ram down my throat the opinion of someone else?

I think it is unnaturally spiky. I think a less-sharpened version would be better.

So?

The thing about your photograph is that it has nothing to do with manual as opposed to automatic focus.

The apparent sharpness in this image is down to a particular editing style, whose merits are down to whether you like that kind of look or not. I happen not to, because it looks unnatural to me. As John says, a bit oversharpened - but that's just my subjective view.

But I'm sure that a tutorial writer on a well known digital imaging magazine knows far more than me, so why should you care what I think?

I feel complimented that you should feel the need to rebuke me for my opinion - thank you.

Just my opinion - which you're free to agree or disagree with - there's no reason to react so violently to it.

The composition is very pleasing, apart from the slightly distracting top left hand corner.

If, all of a sudden, it's a requirement to post award-winning photographs before one may express an opinion on someone else's, then I'm the first to admit that I fall way short of whatever challenge you're referring to.

I've posted lots of photos. One or two of them aren't too bad, although most mark me out as the barely-beyond-beginner that I am.

Sorry if that precludes me from having an opinion.

So what's the significance of this tiger? Sorry, but no tiger looks like this. It has fur, not spikes.

I'd like to see a less over-processed version.

I think people are being pretty hard on the guy, unfairly.

He's a reasonably established poster at pentaxforums.com.

He's taken more care over photographing his K10D body than 99% or more of eBay sellers.

He's found this forum, and has advertised in the right place. And had the temerity to be up front about the PayPal fees.

Well big deal.

If I wanted a K10D body for about £250 I'd take a punt on this one.

Is it not the case that matrix pretty much guarantees that you won't lose the highlights, at the expense of shadow detail?

So a shot where your priority is the (possibly dark) thing in the middle, and you really don't mind losing everything else, will benefit from CW or spot.

This can often mean that the background is grossly burned out, and when this happens, you also tend to lose the edges of the subject. So it's not trivial, even in the cases where you absolutely must keep the centre.

Me too. It felt like cheating to start with, but it's so easy to burn out the highlights with CW or spot, that even if the thing you're pointing at is correctly exposed, the rest of the picture is ruined, so overall the effect is rubbish.