You're welcome. If in doubt buy a genuine Pentax one - they're more expensive but they're beautifully machined and always fit perfectly (some third party adapters can be a bit on the tight side, leading to panic when they don't want to be removed). The Pentax ones are made from chrome plated brass so there's no chance of any small metal shavings falling into the innards of your camera either (something to watch for if the adapter is made from something soft like aluminium).

Metal is fine (I haven't seen one yet that isn't metal to be honest). What you need to watch for is that it sits flush within the throat of the camera's bayonet socket - there are some out there that sit over the top and these latter ones won't allow your old lenses to focus to infinity.

Always carry a spare battery and make sure it's fully charged - nothing is more annoying than a camera conking out half-way through something you really want to shoot.

Yes.

Monday sounds like a good plan to me too - the Sunday was far too packed last year for my liking, hardly got near the stands let alone play with anything. Glad you reminded me about pre-registering too.

Jacobs had a huge stand with quite a bit of Pentax stuff, but it's really more about all the extras like bags, tripods, printers and other accessories. I did get some very good deals but they were on a scanner and some film equipment - it was stuff I was going to buy anyway so the money saved easily covered the cost of the day out.

I've got to admire your persistence and dedication to the cause Don, and I'm personally very glad you and others like you are out there thinking up new ideas and ways of doing things.

Having said that I still think you're not only barking up the wrong tree but you're actually in the wrong forest. Nothing anyone has put forward has explained to me why you would need a sensor as physically big (and as expensive to manufacture) as the 645's in order to shoot video. I do fully understand the call for higher resolution, but in a few years we'll see 40MP in phones and 100+ in SLR/mirrorless cameras.

I don't buy into the 3D argument either I'm afraid - it would be far simpler, cheaper and more elegant to have two APS-C sized sensors side-by-side. In fact I wouldn't be suprised to see Red (or someone of that ilk) come up with such a solution in the very near future.

I'm certainly no physicist but I'd have thought a larger surface area would run cooler as it would have intrinsically superior heat dissipation properties. I'm quite happy to stand corrected on that though!

The main problem I see is that all the current DMF cameras (plus the Leica M9) use CCD sensors and video appears to require a CMOS sensor. While the compromises in using CMOS technology are accepted in prosumer cameras, if I paid £8k+ for the very best image quality I wouldn't want that quality compromised for the sake of feature bloat. Of course there may well be new technologies on the horizon that render the last point moot, but as things stand right now I can't see who would buy an extremely expensive still camera with a less-than-state-of-the-art sensor. I wouldn't...

+1

I use a little blower brush to remove small particles before wiping.

I don't disagree, but those are all measures of resolution *not* sensor size. Red's cameras are already capable of 4K video but use a sensor(s) smaller than/equal to APS-C size-wise.

Ultra-high resolution video is a niche market. Medium format still imaging is a niche market. Other than both being niches though I don't see where they have common ground.

The video part will no doubt cross over into the mainstream sooner rather than later, the medium format sensor likely never will - remaining a premium niche product for high-end art/scientific photography and the like.

Personally I'd view the addition of video to the 645D as being akin to the addition of a tow bar to an F1 car - technically feasible but bafflingly pointless...

Well I read through the links but they rather confirm what I thought anyway.

Yes, the resolution is higher (by some margin) than "Full HD" as shot by most digicams, however, the physical sensor size of the Red One is roughly that of a Micro FourThirds camera and the "Massive" (Red's words, not mine) sensor on the Red Epic has about the same surface area as APS-C (albeit in a very different 2:1 aspect ratio).

So it looks to me like in Red's view, the 4K future of cinema depends on sensors physically smaller than that currently in the K-5, but with less pixel binning to obtain those high resolutions.

Which brings me back to the question; why would you want video in a medium format camera? Sorry Don, but I struggle to think of a machine less suited to the job in all honesty...

Good point! When playing with the one in SRS we did notice the write times were a little on the slow side. To be fair though it is having to write huge amounts of data and my memory card (being quite elderly) probably didn't help. Plus it will let you take the next shot while it's still writing the last one.

Why though?

Surely the resolution limit for playback is HD/1080p so using a 40MP camera seems like complete overkill. Plus the amount of time a computer would take to edit video files shot at full resolution could be measured on a calendar. I'm not really interested in video personally so maybe I'm missing a trick here, but I'd have thought something around the size of an APS-C/35mm sensor would be perfect (with lots of pixel binning to lower the resolution to HD size).

Let's face it, if you can afford a 645D with a set of lenses then you could probably break out some spare change for a K5 to take on video duties..?