Andrew,

Hi from another newbie.

Energizer do a range of AA Lithium non-rechargeables which will provide very good performance in cold weather. They will last about 3 or 4 times longer than the best Alkaline but can cost up to £7 for a pack of 4.

I get good service from
http://www.watchbattery.co.uk/shop/Lithium_Batteries.shtml#AtTheTop


In a warm environment I find the Uniross Hybrio excellent, giving a consistent performance and long lasting because they don't self-discharge like regular rechargeables.

best regards, Coriander

John,

Thanks for the info.

I had formatted the card in the camera. What I was trying to achieve is to use the camera to show some of the photos that I had taken with it. So I copied about 40 or so photos taken with the K100D from my PC archive back onto SD card. These are the original photos simply copied from SD card to PC and back again.

What I don't understand is why the camera should have any difficulty in reading an image that it saved to card originally, albeit copied to PC then back again. Could it be that altering the original image in any way, shape or form, could affect the camers's ability to subsequently read the file again?

Thought I’d share some interesting (?) information with you all. ‘Cos I know just how important these little tidbits are!!

After reformatting my new Sandisk 4GB SDHC in camera (K100D) and then copying some favourite images to it, I found that the camera didn’t see any images. ‘No Image’ came up on the screen when I tried to view them.

Well, I double-checked again on my PC, and sure, they were there.

So I re-formatted again and pasted the images again and they still didn’t appear on the camera viewer.

Blow me down, I thought…… or a very similar phrase..

Aha, I checked my other disks and they had a subfolder called 100PENTX.

I created this on the recently formatted card and copied the images into the subfolder.

Nada, nothing, nix, zilch. No images, again.

I re-formatted. Brainwave. I took a photo, viewed the image. Looked at the card with the PC and voila! 100PENTX subfolder created by taking a photo. I copied my 40 or so images into the subfolder and lo and behold…….. some of them appeared, not all. Some of the images just had a big question mark where the thumbnail should be.

I had renamed all images that didn’t have it with the correct IMGPxxxx format.

Any ideas as to why I should be getting question marks appearing and the message ‘Unable to read image’ ??

Okay, I have the camera of the future in my hands! It’s absolutely brilliant, takes technically flawless shots every time, no matter what the conditions or the subject.

It has no buttons or dials, save for the shutter release. Which in actual fact is a real drag because I have to use my right index finger. What were Pentax thinking about?

It’s a voice-activated device. I just tell it what variations to the optimum I like and it very sensibly asks me for confirmation, while listing all the reasons for not changing the optimum settings. And then it never does!

Of course I’ve already told it what I’m shooting and how I’d like the photograph look like when it’s holographically printed on my travel printer zipped securely in my backpack.

I do miss the lenses though, they were objects of art in their own right. Now the on-board electronics take care of all that, automatically altering perspective and DOF to give extreme wide-angle through to 1000mm telephoto. I just shake my head in amazement. It is truly an awesome piece of kit!

The only thing I would do to improve it is to provide a dial on top to change the camera settings and a few buttons to access menu structures. I know it’s a retrograde step but I just feel that I’m not participating in the production of the photos as much as I want to. My friends think I’m weird, wanting to do things manually when it would surely mess things up! But I don’t want my photos to keep looking like theirs. I want to stamp my own personality on them, be different, you know.

Or maybe you don’t.

Anyway, I keep putting some of my old lenses in front of the camera’s eye and it keeps telling me “Non-standard equipment will invalidate your lifetime warranty, please do not attempt to attach unnecessary features”, followed by another warning about equipment confiscation and discrediting all my work held on the network.

So I’m not taking as many photos now. Where’s the fun?

I like it. The debate that is, it's great nitty gritty stuff. Just what we should all waste our time on

Seriously, though, most of the iconic photographs taken (and I'm thinking black and white from the early days up to say the 80's) didn't use digital, didn't therefore have electronic aids of any kind, yet we all aspire to creating something similar. Roll the clock forward. We now have a camera that has Artificial Intelligence (isn't that what face recognition feels like?) and everyone is taking perfect photos.

Utopia!

I think not. We need to have a flaw in the system so that us creative types can use our guile to overcome it and show everyone how hard we have worked to produce a seemingly, impossibly brilliant, nay perfect, photograph!!

Perhaps something I may not achieve in my lifetime, but I'm damned if I'm going to show one that the camera took on my behalf (whilst I was somewhere else )

I work for an online retailer selling small items which are generally less than £10 in value. We have 500 product lines. We are not/cannot change the prices of all these products by 2.5% it would take us a week to do this because of the nature of our database and accounting software. It would make little difference to the customer shaving a few pence off inexpensive items, so we will adjust our prices on any products over £20 where a 2.5% difference may be appreciated.

This really is the wrong time of year for such a tax change for small businesses, it is usually our busiest month and all hands to the pumps as it were. We don't have the spare capacity to mess around with protracted administration chores. All the changes we will make have to be done late Sunday evening, unpaid overtime. I just love it.

If the government wanted to give more money to people then reduce the direct tax burden by lowering income tax or increasing allowances. Trifling with the VAT rate is just fiddling while the flames get nearer.

By the way, I'm an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer in my spare time and I've also emmigrated three times this year.

(written during my tea-break whilst our customers wait for Monday :wink

El Dingo, Happy Birthday!!

It's mine on Wednesday and I have asked for a Macro lens to supplement the 18-55 kit lens and my Tamron 70-300.

I know I've got the Sigma 105mm macro (because I bought it) and had a little 5 minute play in the garden last weekend before wrapping it up to officially open on Wednesday and I'm pleased as punch.

Brilliant lens! I feel like a big kid again

Coriander.

Actually, thinking about it, it probably isn't the fact that one's beloved camera manufacturer quits the market that is the most worrying thing but the probability that the DSLR as we know it today is morphed into something that doesn't resemble a traditional camera as we know it.

Nikon have started it with their D700 that has high resolution video facilities. The Casio EX-F1 can shoot 60 frames per second 6m pixel jpegs and 1200 frames per second high res video in a package looking suspiciously like a DSLR.

Will we be forced by market trends to give up our single function approach cameras, ie, cameras that only take stills? Will our replacements or upgrades have the kind of attributes the Casio EX-F1 has as standard? Will we embrace this technology like we have with the DSLR over the 35mm film camera? I'm sure we will, especially when it is augmented into our optic nerve

An interesting hypothetical question, that can be applied to a lot of brands and businesses. In Pentax's case, they don't just make cameras and I would have thought that the other parts of their business would support the camera and lens products to some extent. Perhaps their camera and lens part of the business may be ripe for takeover at some point in the future and we may find someone like Nikon holding the purse strings

What would I choose to go for if Pentax became unavailable? Perhaps Nikon. Or maybe I would buy a lifetime's worth of Pentax equipment and spares

Hi,

Paraphrasing Prieni, (hope you don't mind, Prieni)

I think this may be the only reason for abandoning a perfectly good camera and getting something 'better'. I admit to being a gadget freak and can see myself getting a K20D or its successor simply because it has a few things that I might use given the right circumstances, that is, as Scottthehat said, weatherproofing and higher pixel count, cos I'm going to be shooting in the rain and blowing my pics up to fill the side of the house

In the meantime I'll take some of Hefty1's advice and put it on manual like I used to with the old Olympus OMN2.

(Anyone got a K20 going cheaply? :wink