Whatever you do viewing a painting is very different to viewing a painting via a camera and a monitor. It's a fair question that you are asking, but I do feel that you could tie yourself in knots trying to achieve something that is beyond what we could reasonably expect to achieve.

I would suggest the family display the paintings in their various homes, not all of them, but a few selected ones, that can be rotated so they all get a viewing sometime. Then you could produce a record shot of each, shot using good daylight and the daylight setting on your camera. JPEG capture should be fine for this, and the result will be very close. Don't use AWB as that will try to inegrate the colours to a neutral grey, which could lose the nuances of the paintings.

In summary, accept something very close and don't overthink it?

The thing to do in instances like this is to make a report to IT. The report button is at the bottom of every page on the site.

I'll do it for you now.

The JPEG file size is the same as any other image as far as I recall. The RAW one might be huge....Either way, the quality difference is there, but as said above, why not use a larger format if it's that critical? A 645Z would do very nicely.

Having said that, the K-1 is so good......

Apart from testing it out, and proving that it does actually make for sharper images, I have never used it again because the slight increase in quality is one for pixel-peepers. But if you need it, then there it is.

I use the K-3 II and Sue uses the K-3 because she wanted the built in flash. Otherwise, they both take superb quality images.

I have now added a new weekly competition, but changed the end date so that you have a week and a bit to enter.

Hope you have fun with it and enter so many pcitures that I'll be up half the night writing the judging!

PS If you enter, and I hope you do enter, please be prepared to set and judge the next competition and keep things going.

A reminder has been sent and if there's no response I'll sort out a competition to run a week and a bit to give everyone a fair chance to enter.

Rightly or wrongly, I always think upgrades are a tricky moment when things can go very wrong, especially with computers but also with cameras. Unfortunately sometimes they need to be done and it's the only way in the long term.

Fingers crossed that your camera can be restored.

I've found a tilting screen can be useful, especially when the camera is mounted on a tripod, but it's not a deal breaker for me either. In fact, the other side of the coin is that without a tilting screen cameras can be slightly less bulky.

nr will stand for Noise Reduction. With very long exposures the sensor generates random noise, so the camera makes a second "dark" exposure, analyses the noise pattern in that and removes that noise pattern from your shot. It's called Dark Frame Subtraction. This is why a 1 minute exposure needs another 1 minute for the dark exposure to be made.