Rob - that's a good point. The more power a flash puts out, the longer the duration of the flash. Thankfully, with selectable ISO and immediate preview on digital you can at least check the results.
Great example!!

(Of course - make sure you don't get the camera wet!! )
Matt

Life's far too short to even contemplate going there

The comment was for the benefit of the OP who states they use the Amiga, and a Z1 and are wondering why Pentax aren't producing a FF DSLR. Bizarre! It's like a cyclist wondering when Hyundai are going to produce a sports car to compete with the Bugatti Veyron when they haven't even got a driving license

Matt

None of those machines had HDDs that could handle one image of 30 to 120Mb, let alone RAM

Now, doing a RAW conversion in an 8-bit processor running at a couple of MHz... that I'd like to see (Probably like watching paint dry!! :lol

I've nothing against the old machines - I'm currently using a microcontroller with 4k program space and 512bytes RAM, and I've written shed loads of 8085, Z80 code, 68000 family code, 80x86, AVR, ARM9, etc, etc for various hardware projects. But then I wouldn't try and run Photoshop on any them

Matt

This does not erase the previous contents!
It actually asks something along the lines of "There is already a directory with this name. Continue?". What the file system does is to just copy the new files in along with the older ones in the directory.

As I said, once that's happened, it's easy enough to unpick the mistake 10 seconds max.

Matt

You've got a lot of options - all with ups & downs

1) Laptop. Most flexible option. Laptops are not that expensive these days and you can do full editing on them. Some can be pretty bulky though. However, you could also plump for one of the mini laptops (like the new Dell Inspiron Mini, or the Asus EEE PC) - they don't have "normal" hard drives, but you can easily connect a 2.5" external HDD.

2) Portable storage device. These are nice devices... until they go wrong! Mine blew up the day before my holiday last year, so I ended up taking the laptop. They are often pretty slow at copying cards over. And the downside is you have all your eggs in one basket!

3) More SD cards. At the current price of £14.99 for a 4GB SD-HC Extreme III card from SanDisk (www.picstop.co.uk) these are probably the best value for traveling. They're small and light, and if one gets lost, crushed, or broken - then you've not lost all your images!

For quick showing off my shots, I process my RAW files and produce 640x480 (or 320x240) JPG images that I show on my Dell Pocket PC. That way I can have thousands of images on a cheap 1Gb SD card

Hopefully that'll give you some ideas...
Matt

Which one have you got then Teogin??

You'll certainly have fun editing images from any of them on an Amiga
Matt

There's still a problem with your intended approach...

When you hit 999 folders you wrap round to 000 again

To put it into perspective...
1) the *ist-D had no folders at all. Sequential image files only that wrapped from 9999 to 0000.

2) the K10D added a folder option in the form "NNN_DDMM" Bit of a pain as the DDMM ordering is the "wrong" way round for sorting. But I find this better than the *ist-D

3) the K20D has at least added "MMDD" to the equation.

You still need some human intervention and some "higher" process of organisation. You may not think you do at the moment... but that time will come

It's unlikely you'll ever overwrite images. Maybe copy them into the same folder - but then you only have to use the "sort-by-date" option within Explorer (or within the Mac) to work out which ones you've just copied. Takes all of 10 seconds at the most.

It may be a "problem", but it seems a pretty small one to me


Matt

Sounds like a combination of drive spin-up time and TCP/IP throttling.
I have a Freecom NAS which has an option of putting the drive to sleep when not in use. Waking up from this takes an age (30s or so). However, because it's an option I could elect for never putting the drive to sleep.

At work we have a couple of Quantum Snap servers running RAID5. These keep the drives spinning all the time, and they're always available - no delays.

If you are getting a slow transfer after spin-up, then it sounds like the TCP/IP stacks in Windows is surmising that there is some big bottle-neck between the PC and NAS and is slowing down the network transfer to avoid filling up that imaginary "slow-pipe". (There are settings somewhere in the registry that describe how to deal with these situations... I'll have to look into it...)

If the NAS is being used all the time at work - see if you can disable the drive sleep mode. That should sort it (But possibly shorten the life of the drive)

Hope that helps!
Matt

Therein lies the problem. It's not the flash, it's the high ambient light
You need the flash to be a good 3-stops or more brighter than the ambient lighting, otherwise the image formed by the ambient light will become part of the final photo - and that'll include blurry movement.

I reckon if you use HS you'll run into other issues Since the flash in HS mode is firing bursts of light to "pepper" the image with light as the slit in the shutter moves down the frame (which is up, according to the image, IIRC), you'll probably get a shortening of the drops. If you turn the camera upside down and repeat, then the drops will be lengthened (Just surmising... not actually tried this )

Matt

What you describe is the correct behaviour
Don't forget that the individual files will be numbered sequentially across different cards. However, when you hit 9999 it wraps round to 0000 again - so that can be a right pain!

Personally, I use the K10D's similar folder numbering. I copy the folders directly to my PC then rename the folders to suit my filing method. I have images stored by year (so top level folders of 2007, 2008 etc), then the individual folders are in the form "YYYY-MM-DD DESCRIPTION". Having the camera create directories with DDMM is very useful.

It's only a small amount of work, but yields dividends when trying to find something

Of course, it would perhaps have been better if the folders were in the form "MMDD_NNNN" - then they would have been chronological.... except when shooting over December 31st to Jan 1st!

If that's not enough... there are various file renaming and cataloging tools that can use the EXIF information. You've just got to find a method that works for you

Matt