Grumpy or not, I agree with what you say. It is interesting though.

Going back to the link, I notice that they used Bicubic Sharper as the method to upsize, and also did this incrementally. This is IMHO a fault in the method used. It is no longer necessary in Cs2 to upsize incrementally, it will not help and could make matters worse. Also, Bicubic Sharper is designed to maintain sharpness when down-sizing - for the web, for example. Bicubic Smoother is the correct choice for upsizing for print.

Take everything you see on the web with a pich of salt....

Tou're right about sharpness. Digital sharpness is harder-edged than film. To be fair though film only gets the edge when we use very slow, fine grain emulsions and a tripod. I never did that anyway, so digital is pretty good compared to my Tri-X developed in Paterson FX-39.

I think I like digital for its differences with film, especially that clean, crisp look with the right sort of subjects.

Perhaps this is one reason why medium format manufacturers are having such a hard time?

Not sure about that, someone will know. However, are you sure you want to "put all your eggs in one basket"? Using a 4GB card is fine until it becomes corrupted or fails in some other way, and then a very large number of pictures could be lost.

I tend to use lots of smaller cards for this reason, and they are all really cheap enough, aren't they?

Sorry to hear that - it looks like a repair job unless anyone can think of anything else.

Try checking that you're not using a manual focus lens with the camera set to AF - the shutter will only release when the camera thinks it's in focus.

There is probably also a custome setting that only enables you to press the shutter release when in focus. This needs switching off....

If it helps, there's a list of unrepairable items on the Pentax website. When Pentax no longer do repairs there are plenty of imdepemdent reapirers who may well be able to help.

However, expensive repairs may not be good value if you can find a good second hand replacement, maybe at a fraction of the cost.

If you look at "Sellers Other Items" you will fing another *istD, this time with a 70-210mm lens.

I think they are adding in new features that photographers may want, keeping the "It's New!" syndrome that makes some people buy things, but managing to maintain a basically identical production line with its economies of scale.

To be fair, this will generate profit that can be used to grow the business, and to compete with Canon and Nikon it will have to grow. There have been real improvements along the way, though, which we can all benefit from. Not least of which might be the incredibly competitive pricing.