It depends upon the colour temperature of the lights. If they are tungsten lights, set the White Balance to tungsten and see if this is OK. If not, follow the procedure in the camera manual for setting a custom white balance and that should sort it out.

There is a flash setting as well, but AWB (auto white balance) will probably sort that out just fine anyway, which is why you are finding no problem with your outdoor shooting.

Let us know how you get on!

Make sure you are resampling in Photoshop using the "bicubic" option, which will give you the best results. I have found that A3 prints are perfectly satidfactory from the *istDS. Don't forget that when framed the viewing distance will be much greater than holding an A4 print, so there will not be any visible degradation.

I've tried Genuine Fractals, which is supposed to enable large prints from small files, but, although there is indeed no visible pixellation the results look a little "mushy" to me. Not an effect that I like at all.

I've been searching through the info I have, and so far without success. If you have had partial success, can you give some clues as to how old these might be?

Simon

I hope you've started to get to grips with the info you wanted - it's a minefield at first and not at all easy to absorb everything at once.

When I started photography meany years ago, for a long time it was baffling, and sometimes those who should have known were not very clear when they tried to answer questions!

So, do hang in there, and I really hope you get a lot of pleasure from your new direction in photography. I have certainly found the DSLR to be a superb and very seductive piece of kit!

This looks interesting - the camera body would cost around £140 if you paid shop second hand prices, and you would be getting two lenses as well for hopefully much less. For me, it would be worth £100 of my money, but it's a personal judgement and you need to decide how far you will go and stick to it.

If you still need one, in a couple of weeks I will be offering a very nice Pentax MZ5 with the 28-70mm f4 lens. Someone has the option on it at present, and I have given them some time to think it over. After that, if they don't want it then eBay it will be...

The MZ5 is a good choice, as is the MZ3. Both these cameras use a conventional shutter speed dial, so they will seem familiar to a P30 user. You will add all sorts of useful features, and at a reasonable price if you are patient and wait for the right camera to come along.

eBay could be a good source, but buy carefully. Dealers will be more expensive (probably) but are worth checking out.

An "A" lens or later will give you the best functionality, and will certainly do the things you list.

It's only yesterday that I was re-running lens tests with my *istDS. The A lenses on test were the 50mm f2, 24-50mm f4 and 35-70mm f4. Also a 24-90mm FA and the 18-55mm DA. All tested at 50mm, open aperture and f8.

At f8 all were excellent, but the (slight) edge was held by the 50mm prime. There really wasn't much in it.

The 50mm (at f2) and the 18-55mm (at f5.6) were soft. The 24-90mm was better than the 35-70mm which was better than the 24-50mm. Apart from the first two though, results were very acceptable.

Results were observed on screen at 100%.

There would need to be much more investigation than this simple test (photographing a map) but it was envouraging that results were as good as they were.

I hope you find the same with the lenses you have, Kimbo!

The reason I choose to copy the files across rather than move them is a belt and braces approach to ensure the transfer is OK before the images are deleted from the card. personally I feel happier not deleting anything until a CD backup is made as well.

In a similar way, I try not to use a portable storage device when on holiday, preferring where possible to carry enough cards instead. If the device failed, then all the images could be lost. However, if I run out of cards that is another matter!

I'm not sure why you would prefer to use the camera, because the transfer rate will be slower and there is the danger that the batteries will fail and the data could be corrupted.

The card reader is faster and more reliable. I would create a folder to hold the files, open My Computer and drag the folder on the card into the folder in My Documents. The original files, unchanged, will then be transferred into the computer, en masse. They will still also be on the card, but can be removed by formatting in the camera, after you have made a backup CD of the folder on the computer.

I label my folders as CF1, CF2 or SD1, SD2, etc.

That way you should never lose any pictures, unless you are very, very unlucky!