Take plenty of water for Death Valley at this time of year!
Have a great trip.

Thanks to Malo (I think)I now use Geosetter ( www.geosetter.de/en ) for my RAW files. I assume the tags follow into jpegs - because of the date problem I haven't tried it yet.

I haven't reported the problem to Pentax - I wouldn't know how to. The importer here is less than helpful in my experience. I also found the camera had switched to jpeg for a few photos then went back to RAW. I changed no settings, nothing was different. Really weird. It lost days before the firmware update so that isn't it.

I think it may be heading out of the door if I can get a good price for it. Shame really as it was an unexpected present from my husband. I shall have to be very, very nice to him to get him to buy me a K-7 at it's current price. I don't think I can persuade him to take the K20D over from me now he's broken the Ds though.

The new forum format filled a few pages pretty darn quick as I recall . Sadly some of those members never adapted and haven't been back - I'm sure some of them would have enjoyed this debate.

I had no choice - if I wanted the photos I had to get out there and get wet. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, but with only a short time in the area it was get out and get the photos or miss them. I certainly wouldn't have tried it with any other make of camera .
Everything survived just fine. the camera was in a waterproof bag most of the time only coming out for the desired shots. I even left the tripod behind to reduce the time the camera was exposed to the weather - which is where SR came in very handy.

When I have converted them I'll post a couple. The rain worked better for the rain forest than sun did, as in sun the contrasts would have been too great. We went to another area of rain forest later in the holiday, when it was sunny. The photos are all useless.

You are all Pentax users. you should be used to comments like that from magazines (and other photographers) by now.

Seriously though until Pentax start selling their cameras in more places they will remain a minority niche product. The big two with their advertising budgets will continue to influence "impartial" magazine and internet (depressingreview for instance) reviews.

Olympus are expanding by advertising, making their products available at a good price and by regularly coming out with new models. Maybe Pentax should take a leaf out of their book?

The Samsung version of the k20 is usually more expensive than the Pentax version so I can't see them producing a cheaper K-7 clone.

I thought Samsung were looking into micro-4/3rds as a next step, in which case it probably won't have a k mount.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, they come up with.

I have always found camera stores to be very thin on the ground in the US. Even more so than here. Walmart don't actually seem to have Pentax Dslrs btw - I had a look when we were in a couple. In fact last year in New Mexico and Arizona I went to a few shops I found on the Pentax site and only one of them actually had any Pentax gear in, but the shop person was such a pillock (trained by Jessops maybe?) that I didn't bother.


I did buy my first Pentax in the US - in Albuquerque, but I didn't get to go back to that store last year .

It is sealed around the mount. But I stood in the pouring rain taking photos, with no ill effects to lens or camera. When you are touring you don't get the chance to go back to photograph something in better weather, and rain kind of goes with a rain forest doesn't it?

I chose the 17-70 for the range, which suits me better, and because it is an SDM lens. If I had chosen the 16-50 I would have been changing lenses all the time and getting very annoyed. Not to mention how my husband would have reacted - he was getting fed up with me changing lenses all the time as it was. He had the Tamron 28-300 on the Ds so never changed lens, even when I suggested a wider angle would be better.

I have the 17-70. It is a very good walkabout lens. Much less weight than the 16-50 and a more useful range than the 16-45.

The fact that it is an f-4 lens has not been a problem, even in dark rainforests in the pouring rain it took good photos. I'd rather have the extra focal length than the extra stop.

I haven't attempted to read the review completely, my French isn't up to that and I don't like Babel fish type translations, but what I read seems to conclude it is a good lens.

The Mount St Helens photos I posted a few days ago were taken with it.

I have checked all of those - each time it loses a day I recheck all of those. I don't use a destination time because of geotagging the files.

I have found a program which will batch re-date jpegs, (http://tinyurl.com/mm3ufw) so I will geotag jpegs, and when I think of it/am bored/have a few minutes to spare I'll work my way through the RAW files by hand in PhotoME. Eventually I'll be able to geotag the RAW files too. A right royal pain in the behind though.