What I don't understand is why someone hasn't cleaned up in this business.

There must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people with lots of slides and negs to scan - and no economic way of doing it.

Unless whoever it is has a high degree of automation, £50 for 300 sounds very cheap.

Isn't your camera a K10D? Was the remote a wireless one?

If so, then using a remote trigger turns the SR off, according to the manual.

Well unless the camera can tell the difference between being held by a hand, and by a tripod mount, logically this must be so if you can hold it steady enough.

I've seen plenty of arm-waving speculation for what might cause SR-induced blur, but no good evidence for it, though. I've taken quite a few tripod-mounted SR-on shots looking for it and seen nothing. You'd think it would be easier to find given that Pentax mention switching SR off in the manual.

It's easy enough to see if the SR is working at all...

Set up a long exposure, take the lens off, press the button, and watch the sensor move when you move the camera a little. It's very obvious when it's doing its compensation thing.

How close to the sensor are you getting the nozzle of the blower?

I've found on a few occasions that a dust spot has been a bit stickier than most, but I've managed to shift it by getting the nozzle to within a centimeter or so of the sensor.

Of course, this requires extreme care, since it's very difficult to give the bulb a good hard squeeze without the nozzle jerking a bit, with the risk of nasty consequences.

I've worked out a way of holding it that effectively braces the barrel of the nozzle against the edge of the chamber, which stops most of the movement.

So I can give it a good hard puff at close range - never failed to shift yet.

A bit scary though.

There's nothing in the manual, but it can be done.

Have a look at this thread:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7849

The thing is, lots of beginners don't. You may do, in which case the comment doesn't apply to you.

Lots of non-beginners don't, too.

It's a very common feature of lots of forums - people rock up, ask a question in a very general, non-specific way, clearly not having taken much in the way of steps to help themselves.

I don't think you need take that comment personally.

I really think issues with the focus should be separated from issues with the lens and issues with noise.

As always, 'real-life' pictures are hopeless for finding out exactly where the camera is focusing.

Download the focus test chart, set it up properly, with the camera on a tripod, eliminate shake by using the delayed mirror-up release and find out where it's focusing for sure.

In the absence of any other way of reinstalling from CDs I would urge you to consider the VM route.

- You get the old computer running in a window
- You can back up the whole thing just by copying a file
- You can free up the physical space taken by the old one
- You don't need to reinstall anything
- You can set it up so that it can access all the data on the new one.

KVM switches are great in theory, but not all of them work properly. If you pick one, check out the relevant forums to see how many people are screaming with frustration. No file transfer, of course.

VNC is a great remote control tool, but the free version doesn't include file transfer, I think.

Remote Desktop is also great, and does allow file transfer, but you can't remote into a PC that has XP home (without a lot of technical fiddling about).

How about this, as a solution that would also allow you to have a backup of all those applications, together with their passwords:

I moved to a new computer recently, and used VMWare (which has a free version), to suck the entire* old computer across my home network into a new virtual machine running on the new one. If I need to run the old computer, I run it on the new one. You can back up the whole thing by copying the virtual hard disk.

Very cool - I was amazed when it worked, but it did**.

______________

* Edit: well not quite the entire machine. I actually only sucked over the partition with the operating system and installed applications. I moved the data across to the new one, and if I run the old one in the VM, I map a drive letter on it to the shared data drive on the new one. This means I have one copy of the data, so no confusion regardless of where I access it from.

** after it had loaded all the new drivers it needed. It prompted for each one, though, when booted up for the first time, and found them without problems.

You need to cut back on the sauce, George. It's no good having you as my linguistic role model if you're going to do this to me.