Your salesman is correct when he says "TC-S for Pentax are working ONLY with manual focus" but he should have also told you that the SMCP-F 1.7x AF Adapter will give you AF capability, even with a manual focus lens. It does have limitations, in that you need to roughly focus in manual first, it does not give you full range AF.

When fitted between the camera and lens, the AF capability of the lens is disabled and the TC does the focussing via the screw drive mechanism.

This TC works superbly with the DA* 300mm lens and with practice shows very little loss of image quality.

I believe this is the only AF capable TC from Pentax but other makes do exist.

Using Lightroom?

It might help others to know what information here helped you.

The F series of lenses were Pentax's first auto focus range. I believe that many of the FA versions are optically identical to their equivalent F series lenses and that only the body styling was changed.

So I believe that your SMCP-F 50mm 1:1.4 lens is optically identical to an SMCP-FA 50mm 1:1.4 lens.

In fact, I think all of Pentax's 50mm 1:1.4 lenses share the same optical formula, number of blades etc. There could be small differences in the coatings of some of them though.

Optical Formula 7 elements in 6 groups
Aperture Range f/1.4 ~ f/22
Number of Aperture Blades 8
Minimum Focusing Distance 0.45 m
Maximum Magnification 0.15 X

You'll find a (more or less) complete Pentax history from 1910 here.

The camera model names are the US names. EG: The Super Program was sold as the Super A in Europe. Where you see a model name starting ZX, in Europe they were named MZ.

Pah, I didn't want one anyway

Enjoy.

BTW: You'll now be elected to provide the first in depth review of no less than 20 pages (fullscap)

You'll be looking for a Honeywell Pentax H3 (AKA S3) then which was launched in 1961.




Here's one complete with a decent lens, but it's in the USA so postage will be expensive and you may have to pay import duty & VAT.

I wish it was coming to me, but sadly, it isn't.

Something like that, except you can add a negative thickness shim using the in-camera adjustment, which would of course be impossible in real life without the aid of a file/grinder.

There probably are ways to adjust the lenses themselves if it could be proved that the lens was at fault, but another poster suggests that one lens requires different adjustments depending on which camera it is mounted.

That would suggest to me that the camera focussing mechanism is at fault, hence the availability of the adjustment in the first place.

Firstly, RAW image files, be they .PEF or .DNG are not changed in any way, except perhaps metadata, by any RAW processing software.

Instead, some RAW editors save any changes that you make in a 'sidecar' file. When said editor reopens the RAW image, it then applies any changes it finds in that sidecar file. The original image file is untouched.

Lightroom instead uses a database to keep all of your image changes. They call it a catalogue but it's a database all the same.

No RAW editor that I know of can export RAW images, they only export as one of the other 'normal' image file formats like JPG, TIF, PNG.

If you are using Pentax software to export images, they'll be in one of these formats not RAW, PEF, or DNG.

You really need to discover why .DNG files are not being recognised in Lightroom. Have you updated your LR3 to the latest version of LR3 yet? If not, do so without delay and report back.

If you open Lightroom, click Help > About, your LR version and (more importantly) Camera RAW version numbers will be displayed (top right in LR 4.2), what versions are you running?

The Pentax K5 camera was supported in LR 3.4 which used Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) 6.4.

Good job done. Great looking car, excellent model, but I have some observations:-

1: Why is the rear number plate blank, yet the front one has an index number showing?
2: The model might prefer her modesty to be preserved, rather than revealing her underwear in #4.
3: I would have expected sharper images from the 50mm 1:1.7 lens.