greynolds999

While for the most part i agree with your comment about the green mode. I must add that i feel very letdown by the D40 because i know what kind of pictures my parents took with the film F401. And now when they take pictures with the D40 they are overexposed, lacking detail and generally they come off pretty poor. The ideas in the pictures are often good, but the technical side is a huge letdown.

Now to my understanding the f401 was largely automatic slr, not to mention the developing process of the film, send us the roll and we develop it. A lot of neat shots, not so with the D40. Well you could get the same effect with raw and free time, but its not very automatic if you work each picture by hand. Overall i am disappointed by this decrease in "green mode" quality, but on the other hand D40 has good qualitis like high-iso which was a huge problem with parents P&S automatic mode or not.

To put a long story short, its not really about me its about my parents shooting with their first DSLR and me watching in disbelief as the D40 automatic modes cant keep up with the early nineties.

Buying a k-m would be a stopgap solution for me but would end up as a camera to my parents with a budget 70-300mm zoom(+kit 18-55), i did the same thing with D40 (kit 18-55) (minus the 70-300mm zoom as i couldnt afford it), parents didnt like the P&S powershot quality but at the same time were not willing to buy a new camera. So i got myself a D40 with the intention of selling it to my parents as pro bono, metering was problematic but oh well.. not going to return it so. Now k-m i could pair up with a budget zoom, add in shake reduction and it all translates to "a lot of bang for the buck". This all assuming of course that i like k-m metering, only way to find out would be to buy or borrow one, dont think borrowing is going to happen.
On quick look i think k-m has less buttons than D40 which is actually a pretty good thing.

On second thought i think im going to keep it simple and go straight to k-7 assuming its a success. Its too bad that none of my nikon lenses are any use for my parents as they either require the in-body motor or the range is already covered.

The sensitivity mode is very interesting i can also think a few situations where i really could have used TAv.

hefty1
Thanks for the link, that website is very impressive but unfortunately i dont think it represents the "green mode" shooter that well. Still a great website. I think the only way to really find out is to use the k-m myself.

Thordell
Im not as brave as you but then again i dont know pentax yet or have any pentax gear. It feels great to have some goals .

Actually my fever to switch system is steadily rising as i am now looking at the k-m and i have noticed that you can buy a 70-300mm tamron lens for it at 139 euros and because you attach it to a pentax it is of course stabilized.

My parents own a frequently overexposing D40, stark contrast to film, they got better pictures with the F401. They are pretty reluctant to buy new lenses as they are somewhat expensive meaning they cant buy sub 200€ lenses because they need the AF-S, they cant use their old nikon lenses as D40 lacks the focus motor. Old nikons they own are sub-par for digital so its not a huge loss for them to switch system.

They could afford new lenses but they are the kind of people who'd really liked to have something but they are very reluctant to get it unless it comes with a very low price tag and lifetime warranty, impossible combination.

I know that if i switch systems my parents will at some point follow, photography kind of goes in the family but my parents pretty much dropped out because of digital. I never mastered film even thought i tried but then when DIGITAL started i picked up .

Is there a place other than flickr or pbase to browse pictures taken with k-m, i am especially interested how it works in green mode and how much the metering has improved.

Who knows i might even get k-m first and k-7 second. That way i could afford that 35mm f/2.8 sooner, but then the k-7 would have to wait 1-2 months more. Then give k-m to my parents, sell D40 and buy k-7.

AnnetteW, Greytop, JudithAnn

Thanks for the welcomes .

Cant say for sure how active i will be here, i guess i will go at least semi-lurker for the time it takes K-7 to arrive. I really wish K-7 excels because i havent been this excited about a camera for a long time, not D300, D90 or D5000. I got settled with D200 and from there on i have been pretty much indifferent about cameras. Occasionally i have glanced the D300 but it has been more to do with lack of options than genuine interest towards new camera.

Ok i reworked my list, now it has 17-70 f/4 and 55-300mm. I had to drop the prime, i believe i could
still afford one but i need to keep some safety margins what it comes to spending, so the prime has to wait a bit. This is a list i am working assuming K7 is a noticeably stronger camera than K20D, i believe K7 will excel and im going to be a pentax user in the future, in the unlikely case of a dud i just keep going with what i have.

There are really no other alternatives, olympus has small ovfs, canons are somewhat like nikons. Well there is the sony option, sonys are comfortable and their grip reminds me a lot of what K7 has. For some reason sony doesnt sound as much of a plan as pentax.

Thanks for the link.

Well starting the update is the easiest part. The hard part comes once its done and you have to sort the mess out. To be fair i used linux 3 years ago, they might have improved altought different distros different skill sets. My friend used ubuntu a year ago and said that as long as you dont let it update itself its a very stable OS.

I have updated xp and vista plenty of times and no problems. Also updating Mac OS X was always a breeze but updating my linux got me nervous every time. I have to mention that during my use OS X has been the only OS that got faster as the version numbers increased.

Debian is a neat linux to use but i never ran full updates just single packages every now and then as i was playing around with setting up a server.

Windows 7 is very promising.

Actually XP and Vista are pretty solid operating systems, i have used linuxes and nothing is scarier than updating your linux distro. Also owned a mac and have to say that mac os is pretty neat, but in my opinion macs are sort of luxury items. PC performance is cheap nowadays, its not pretty as a mac but still efficient.

Ive thought about getting 21mm f/3.2, 35mm f/2.8 macro and 70mm f/2.4.
Now im not sure in what order to get them. I kind of like the idea of having a 21mm prime for start because most of the time i find myself moving backwards not forwards when framing with a prime. However the 35mm macro capabilities are very interesting.

Oh also that 17-70mm f/4. No way i can afford everything this year, well maybe if i dont eat much . Perhaps 70mm and 35mm can wait, so i end up with 18-55WR, 55-200WR, 21mm and 17-70 f/4.

I am using a 3rd party free raw-converter to work my raw-files. So NEF-compatibility with my old raws is guaranteed. However the converter doesnt update often, i am very sure that once i get the K-7 i cant work the raw-files with my favorite software for about a month. But its not a big problem since pentax comes with software to handle raw.

My question was about software used to transfer images from the camera to the computer. Nikon has nikon transfer i use it, does pentax have something equivalent?.

Nikon transfer program keeps tracking the running numbers and renames the images as they are transferred, by using a transfer program i will never have two images with the same file name and no matter how i mix my pictures they are always in correct order ie. in the order i took them.

Sorry to bring up an old thread but this K7 addresses all the problems i had with the K20D, it even has an AF-lamp. Also its amazing how compact the K7 is, my D200 is on the limits of being too big for me so i wasnt that impressed when handling a D300 which felt even bigger.

If K7's IQ holds up and its quirk free (no banding, reliable), i think i will be definitely going pentax by the end of this year.

Now i know that pentax cameras comes with a raw-converter software. However is there a nikon transfer like software for pentax, which handles transfering images from the camera and renaming them.

I know camera keeps a running number but that is not very reliable as it tend to reset as with my D200, D70 and D80. So using a software to transfer and rename is much more reliable. Nikon has nikon transfer for this.

Now there might be a perfectly good 3rd party software for transfering and renaming images, but it would be very simple to use the software in the package.

Thanks for the very informative reply. Now i really need to find a store where i can touch that K20D. How the camera feels has a lot of do with my decision, im looking forward how it lives up to all the praises. I really like the idea of a solid and compact dslr. What ive seen from pictures its noticeably smaller than rest of the gang, but it packs a lot of things others dont.

Ok just a quick mention. I have tried a few .pef files with my raw-converter and i was able to process them with ease. The 4mpix resolution difference is quite noticeable, its actually a quite a leap and i am amazed with some of the detail there is. All the samples were however taken under very optimal conditions, so there was not much of a challenge but i sort of get the idea what i could do with the 14mpix.

Now i try to envision the same pictures with a really nice prime.