If we want to do HDR Andrew, then the best way is make multiple exposures and put them through a program such as Photomatix. The in-camera effect is a bit weak really, IMHO.

HDR is often used for excessive effects, but for severe dynamic range, such as church interiors, it can be used to deliver impressive, natural looking images with full detail throughout.

Isn't this though a repeat of the K-01 story, where some could not accept the new design but now it's quite sought after? There does seem sometimes to be quite a resistance to new ideas, whereas others are enjoying what it has to offer.

I was quite impressed with the detail and crispness of the MX-1's 1cm macro setting. I'm using the camera more and more for eBay images as it's so verstile.

And best wishes to you as well Gary! I shall raise a glass of cheer to everyone on the forum a little later.

Cheers!

If you shoot RAW then you can choose the WB setting after the event, certainly in ACR.

AWB is something I avoid, except in severe mixed lighting, because I tend to want the ambient colour of the light to be retained. For the same reason, I change the setting to a fixed value, otherwise the camera will continue to make judgements within a limited range regardless of the setting.

The most suspect condition for Pentax cameras seems to be deep shadow on a bluish winter day, where things rapidly turn purple. The "shade" setting corrects this well.

I think wives might be more perceptive than that, they will pick up the frisson of excitement and know quite well what's going on.....

The digital filters and so on only apply to the JPEG file. In fact, we can't shoot RAW at all in some modes, such as HDR.

There is another argument of course that, far from being a weak processor, the JPEG output of a camera is carefully tweaked by the manufacturer to get the optimum from that particular model. This could be in ways that we couldn't hope to guess at or emulate as we don't have the information. So the quirks of a particular sensor design, the shortfalls of a lens design, can all be corrected using JPEG.

In one sense it would be interesting to actually pit the RAW route against the JPEG route, but in the end it's the image that counts and there's no real world evidence that anyone can spot the difference. I tried this with the *istDS, making large A3 prints from RAW and JPEG files of the same scene. Even looking closely, very few people could see any difference, and some of those guessed the wrong way round.

Now the game has changed, and in our last print competition the judge was complimenting the staggering detail (his words) in an image produced by the Q-S1, a JPEG file by the way. In the end, it's all about the final image.

It does seem an over complication though, when all that is needed is to format the card in the camera it's going to be used in?

It's the slightly incomplete description that caused the confusion. The macro lens is a D-FA Macro, the FA is a standard lens, not macro.

SMC Pentax-FA 50mm f/1.4

SMC Pentax-D FA 50mm f/2.8 Macro

These are the two currently available 50mm FA designated lenses.

There are indeed such things as iconic cameras. These are models that changed the way we approached photography in some significant way.

One example is the Pentax Spotmatic of 1964, a revelation with its inbuilt CdS light meter. Another might be the ME Super, the pinnacle of the compact automatic cameras of the 1980s.

Does the K-5 achieve this? An interesting thought, and I'm undecided. Is it too soon for any digital camera to be iconic, or not?