I wish they'd just say something doesn't work then, rather than give detailed instructions in the manual telling you how to do it.

I wasted a lot of time earlier in the year, establishing for myself that the stop-down-metering didn't work. I didn't spend as long as that on this, fortunately.

I wish they'd just be up front about what works and what doesn't, and issue addenda/errata to the manual so that the customers don't have to do their testing for them.

I love the camera, but there are some very dark corners of its feature set where the documentation and Pentax's communication is just pants.

Well, once all the pre-flashing is over, the camera has presumably done its metering, and told the slave how much power to output, and how many flashes to do during the actual exposure. If the timing electronics are reliable and precise enough (which is what amazes me for wired HSS, let alone wireless), it wouldn't need to control every one of the flashes that takes place during the exposure - they should all happen at the right time.

But what do I know? I can imagine them putting something in the manual that doesn't work, but not something that's impossible .

I'm sure this is true - this specific point is addressed in the manual, where it says, in this context:

"The built-in flash is used for control flash only. It will not be used for the main flash."

As you say, there seems little point including all the instructions on how to use it, if it's not suppose to work.

I'm still hoping I'm just doing something dumb.

Yes, I tried putting the flash on the shoe, with the camera flash mode set to wireless, and then I could alter the shutter speed at will.

It's not the end of the world - I doubt if I'll need wireless (or even wired!) HSS very often - but it's annoying nevertheless.

Both the Samsung and Pentax AF-540 manuals explicitly refer to being able to do it, so it's not just a possible Samsung/Pentax difference, not that that's all that likely anyway.

I've been experimenting a bit with HSS on the K10D and the SEF-54PZF - the Samsung equivalent of the AF540FGZ.

On the hot shoe, it works as expected.

However, my understanding is that since Firmware 1.1 (I'm on 1.3 now), which added the ability to use the built-in flash as a wireless controller and master, I should be able to do HSS wirelessly as well.

However, if I set the camera to Manual or Shutter Priority, and also set its flash mode to Wireless, it won't let me increase the shutter speed to a shorter exposure than 1/180 when the built-in flash is up.

Any ideas? I have the illusion of having followed the instructions, but it's quite possible that I've misunderstood something.

I can do 8 with a really, really old 1 GB card, which I got long before all these super fast ones came out. And even after the first 8, it'll still keep going at about 1 every two seconds. That's in RAW. In JPEG it'll go continuously indefinitely, even with the poxy old card.

If you really need a >8 frame RAW buffer then I guess the K10D is the wrong camera.

I don't want to hassle you with an extended argument about all this - if you're not happy with the camera then fair enough, and sometimes even one feature in something can be important enough to put you off. If you want to do lots of B&W, and not have to do anything at all to see the results on the LCD, then maybe the K10D's not for you.

However, I am puzzled. You've said you don't want to do much PP on the computer. So what do you want RAW for, in circumstances where you might want to bracket the contrast?

If you do in-camera RAW-JPEG conversion, as I understand it, you end up only with the JPEG that you'd have got if you'd taken the picture in JPEG mode in the first place. And of course, you can convert the same RAW image in-camera in as many different ways as you like - all the JPEG options, in fact.

So having to be in JPEG to do contrast bracketing doesn't seem a limitation.

RAW is what the sensor saw. So contrast bracketing (where all it does, I believe, is apply different parameters to the generation of the JPEG) is pointless, since you have all the information that you can use later.

I suppose you could argue that you ought to be able to do it in RAW+, to get the best of both worlds. And I'd agree with you, but it's a bit of a minor point I think.

You can do something very similar to this with the K10D.

Once you've taken a picture, or several, you change to playback mode, and then just hit the 'Fn' button, and use the 4-position switch to select the filter icon on the left.

That gives you access to pretty much exactly what you describe here - all visible on the LCD. In B&W, you can have red/green/blue filters, sepia, colour filters... and once you've picked a filter you can still scroll through the pictures with it selected. You can save the edited ones as a new file.

I can't comment on the usability of this compared with other cameras, but it isn't very hard. Admittedly the camera itself isn't in B&W 'mode' as such, but it all seems to achieve the same as you're describing. I suppose if "selecting Playback/Fn/Select Filter icon" is really a chore compared with other cameras, it could become annoying.

I'm not at all convinced that the specific issues with the camera are really valid. You have made an error of fact, in that you can take bracketed exposures in RAW, so maybe consider the possibility you're wrong about the other things too.

But anyway, hope you get something you're happy with eventually.

I expect it is possible to be happy in life with a non-Pentax camera, despite the impression you might get to the contrary here.

Is he still a friend?

To my mind there's nothing wrong with rediscovering a technique yourself, even if others have done it before.

And it was a lot less clichéd in 1980.

You're right.