Thank you for the details. I am about to do a websearch for the company you mentioned to see what else they have to offer.

Thanks again.

I bought a D-BG2 from a reputable EBAY dealer in New York just after Christmas. I tried ordering from UK dealers first but lost patience with the "don't know when we can get one" attitude and the extortionate prices.

Shipping costs from USA were about £22.

Import costs were £29.10 and broke down as:

VAT - £15.60

Parcelforce clearance fee - 13.50

Even after all that it was £40 cheaper than the cheapest UK quote (with no firm delivery date but many saying "Oooooh....it could be at least a month). The product took about a week and a half to arrive, but three or four days of that were due to it being held back until Parcelforce had written to me advising of the charges to be paid before they could release it.

I have been enormously impressed by the subtlety and gradation performance of the K10D's sensor - especially when it is set to low contrast. If a sensor of that quality with the 22 bit processing is scaled up to 645 I don't think Pentax will have any problems selling them to anyone earning a living from it. No more polaroids and, as you so rightly say, ability to take many more shots at no cost. I'm up for it.

I've been especially impressed with the performance the K10D's sensor produces when set to low contrast. Gradation and subtlety of colour reminds me of the low contrast films I used to use. This has probably been helped by the 22 bit processing. Even when it is averaged down to 12 bit (or even 8 bit for jpeg) it does prove the point that a bigger sample will give a more accurate average.

I wouldn't retire the 5x4 just yet. Even if the 645's sensor turns in large format performance it still won't give any of those very useful camera movements.

I'll have to take your word for this, though it amazes me. Is it not possible that sales have been hit because pros realise the shift to digital has begun and there is no point in making a big investment in rollfilm cameras?

I should have thought the only advantages a minature format DSLR has over medium format film is immediacy and economy - not necessarily the principal factors for choosing medium format in the first place. The quality difference between minature and medium format has always been striking, at least for big enlargements. It is hard to imagine that anyone with a requirement for superior quality would ditch it in favour of economy and convenience in the long term - the clients won't stand for it. I suspect that once medium format cameras are available at something other than Hassselblad's fetishistic prices, the line will become more profitable. Hasselblad are charging an astronomical price because they have always been able to do so for a hand-built product they take a year to construct. Many studio based photographers chose cameras like the old Mamiya C330 (or dare I say it, the old Pentax 67) at a fraction of the price of a Hasselblad and produced stunning results in spite of it.

Pentax has had a sigificant presence in medium format market for something like 37 years. I would be staggered if they abandoned that position to chase minature format success alone.

It has been many years since I have used an MX Motor Dive so my memory may not be accurate in every detail, but as far as I recall:

The MX motor drive had to have the film length set (from 1 to 36 exp) or it could wrench the film from its canister when it reached the end of the roll. The motor drive counted down the frame numbers as they were taken and stoped at zero (assuming the correct film length had been set). I do not believe it would power-rewind the film as the LX Motor Drive would, but it is possible I have forgotten.

Generally the drive used the screw-on Ni-Cd battery pack M which had an auxilliary shutter release at the rear and allowed single shot or continuous shooting on shutter release. It could also make use of the LX Ni-Cd battery pack (just as the LX could use the MX pack). It used the charge pack M for recharging. There was also a large pistol grip battery pack which attached in place of the battery pack M. This allowed the use of alkaline AA cells for extra punch.

If memory serves you couldn't set a precise frame rate. A control allowed selection of high to low speed (5 fps down to 0.5 fps). This was probably sensible as frame rate depended on the state of the battery and shutter speed in use. The motor drive's grip with trigger release at the front improved the handling of the MX, particularly with longer lenses and gave a more positive anchor for the fingers. In many respects the K10D's grip reminds me of the Motor drive MX grip.

Once attached to an MX body it formed a very nice solid unit and performed flawlessly. In use it was much more aggressive and powerful than the winder.

Phil Askey's review of the K10D suggests the sensor may not be manufactured by Sony:

"Interestingly this CCD has slightly different specifications than the Sony unit used in a few other ten megapixel digital SLR's so we can't be sure of its origins. It's 23.5 x 15.7 mm with 10.75 million total pixels, 2-channel read-out. "

Thanks for the update. Current information always helps.

DNG has probably been adopted by Pentax because it is an open standard and is far more likely to have support long-term. There are already proprietry RAW formats for which the manufacturer's software no longer exists. There is also an issue with some manufacturers (Nikon for example) who have begun encrypting the white balance data in their RAW format. This might sound trivial, but it is not.
Intellectual property restrictions make it illegal for third party companies (Adobe etc) to decrypt this data, so if Nikon decided at some point to stop supporting that format, its users are stuffed (i.e. you won't be able to open your own photographic files). From what I can gather most manufacturers have been at it to varying degrees. Pentax alone so far has accepted a universal RAW format and should get some recognition for it. As usual, some reviewers give it a quick nod, if that, and then move on to fret and suck their thumbs over the Pentax jpeg algorithm. That said, the K10D does turn in superior resolution (in fact superior everything except file size)in RAW.

You are absolutely right. But after thirty years of being a Pentax user I am growing weary of all of the cringing and fawning on the part of some reviewers towards the two dominant marques in minature format photography. Neither of these marques have any presence in medium format - a presence Pentax has had since about 1970, first with the 67 and then the 645.