Zeta, if it helps any, there's only one person like George here

But he does know a lot of stuff, and he's very willing to share his knowledge. Just put on your asbestos gloves and fire-proof suit (coated with an extra layer of fire-retardant just in case) whenever you engage with him.

It's something of a rite of passage here, anyway, it seems, to run the gauntlet of George's caustic keyboard. It's even quite humorous sometimes, except when you're on the receiving end of it.
Indeed.
See? He can't resist it can he (and smileys aren't usually his strong suit )

But he is right when he says this:
It's almost impossible to know how to help with technique that people are struggling with until we've seen some examples of the problem.

Don't be put off, and try to be as specific as you can when describing your problems.

Good luck with the K100D.

[gulp]

Thank you.

I'm most grateful for people's patience while I battled with a monitor that really needs replacing. I'll make sure I look at the entries for next week on something a bit newer.

This is from my ME Super days. It's a barn fire about 300 yards from where I was living at the time. It was published in the local paper

Ok, supplementary dumb question, if I may.

How can a lens be responsible for contrast without definition, or vice versa?

At risk of asking a dumb question, what precisely does "soft" mean?

The reason I ask is that the terms "soft" and "sharp" seem to be used by different people in different ways.

For instance, Pete's notorious lion picture was allegedly super-sharp, yet as Matt explained this was more to do with the post-capture processing than anything else. And again, my unsharpened pineapple picture was described by someone as out-of-focus (though Matt confirmed my view that it wasn't).

The "sharpness" that people seem to be arguing about seems to me to be much more about contrast than about sharpness - I've always interpreted sharpness to be about detail resolution, which you wouldn't expect to be improved by any sharpening process - either the detail is there, or it isn't, and artificially enhancing the contrast at the edges, while giving the appearance of crispness, does not put any more in, and of course, can take some out.

So is there a right and wrong definition? There certainly seems to be a lot of confusion, which suggests to me that our terminology could be ...

... I nearly said "sharpened up" there, but that would be too contrived, so I won't

With memory card density increasing at least as fast as sensor density, wouldn't this be a bit superfluous too? Building space into the body for two cards, together with the electronics to handle them as you say, seems completely pointless given how easy it is to change the card.

I can see this with the 50mm A 1.7 too.

Some, probably.

I have a mate, who was at one time quite a keen film SLR type. She's about to buy one of these:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Ricoh/ricoh_gx100.asp

It's the fact that it's small that makes the difference to her, so I expect that compacts will be around for a while yet. She also says that she doesn't know how long she'll be able to hold off getting a DSLR as well.

I suspect it's more that for those that can compose a picture, the compacts will be invading (D)SLR territory for quality.

I had occasion to call Intro2020 this afternoon, looking for prices on some Pentax off-camera bits. They were quite happy to quote me £27 and £22 plus VAT for a Hot Shoe Adapter Fg and a Sync cord F5P respectively - they didn't ask me if I was a dealer.

Why on EARTH are those bits so expensive ?????

A video camera, at a guess.