It depends how you define good, and it would possibly be that the BMW was a dreadful car, for someone who wanted an economical runabout that was easy to park in towns.

Likewise with cameras. So having used them is helpful when highlighting differences between them.

Yes, it uses a different DC motor.

It would probably need to be P-TTL to work fully, so there may well be limitations. The other limitation I can think of is that you won't be able to set an aperture smaller than f/8. So you might need to use some layers of cloth or paper over the flashgun to reduce the intensity of the light, as well as reduciung the camera ISO.

Making a diffuser to fit the flashgun would no doubt do the trick, perhaps combined with different thicknesses of white cloth or paper.

I found we had to turn down studio lights quite a lot to use the Q.

There's the usual Pentax-dedicated hotshoe on the Q, so any flashgun suitable for the DSLRs will work fine.

Yes indeed Stan, as usual the competition allows for all Pentax cameras, so compacts would be included and many of the effects are available on the compacts too.

While we're thinking about it, I wouldn't throw out any film images either, but in that case an effect like Bleach Bypass would of course have to be done the traditional darkroom way.

The problem is that it's anecdotal. Yes, many people say this, but is it borne out by what people are actually buying? If we do a poll to ask then the voters are self-selecting, which is what I meant by there being no randomness to the sample. What do we mean by more and more?

The manufacturers will do market research to assist them in planning, but the results will depend on who is asked, what exactly they are asked and who will actually stop to answer. Nobody asks those who say "not now" and walk off, but for all we know they might be the camera buyers.

When TV sets were 4:3 a TV company asked the public if they preferred seeing films converted to 4:3 or as 16:9 and explained the latter as "you know, when you get black bands at the top and bottom of the screen". How many do you think simply voted to have the image as 4:3, simply because "well we don't want black bands on the screen, we'll lose half the picture" without actually understanding the question? As it happens we now have widescreen anyway, but the point is there as an example of misunderstood information.

I would double check anyway that one of the image styles has not been switched on, such as Bleach Bypass or Cross Processing.

Polls are generally useless as they are only answered by people interested in some aspect of the poll. There is no randomness in a poll that leaves participation up to the voter.

All it can really be looked upon is as a bit of fun.

I doubt very much that we would see any difference in a web image between a 12-bit and 14-bit image. The variations between images and between different photographers would be vastly more important.

Why not pop down to a suitable store, depending on your location, and try to handle the options? Although it can be possible to return items ordered by mail order, it's much more convenient to view side by side.

This has the advantage of ensuring that any dust particles will fall away from the sensor and shutter mechanism, rather than towards.

I agree that the lens should not be resting with any weight on it, so we use our Billingham inserts for the same purpose, to take the weight on the body itself.