Kind of sounds much like this:
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5015

Matt

Steve,
If you're looking to purchase studio lighting, then I've heard very good reviews about the Elinchrom DLite-2 Kit. A snip at around £400. (And www.ephotozineshop.com did have a couple of mail-order return ones that were cheaper still)

(I very, very nearly went that route, but I ended up with an AF360 and AF540 that work just fine for me with a shoot-through umbrella).

Regarding the Pentax engineer's comment - you should've mentioned that first. Maybe they're right. Who knows! As you can see from the thread most don't have any issues with Pentax (just the studio gear ).
Matt

Don't quite see how you can justify this statement
I know of one issue with "cheap and cheerful" studio flash units. Just because your particular setup didn't work, doesn't mean that there's a general problem, and trying to claim there is, frankly makes my blood boil as it's quite illogical!

Pentax will probably say to upgrade whatever (if you told them what you've told us, then there's absolutely no information in your comment as to what the problem is)

One question though - have you tried your K10D with a regular flash gun? And did it work?

You said you tried "IR/Radio triggers" and "two hotshoe adapters" - was the result identical in all cases? Did you get ANY flash from the studio units? Or were the images wrong??

Need more info
Matt

Steve,
You don't mention what equipment you were trying to use!

One other poster had a problem with studio flash that turned out to be a polarity issue on the flash system (think they were Interfit or Portaflash flash units).
Most tend to use an InfraRed trigger that mount on top of the camera hot shoe - that eliminates the cables and solves any polarity issues with wired connections.

If you were trying to trigger wirelessly off the pop-up flash - it won't work (not with Pentax, nor Canon nor 99% of DSLR cameras) because it fires a preflash to perform metering before firing the main discharge. This would result in studio units discharging on the preflash (so you see them fire), but you'll see nothing in the resulting image.

(I'd be very surprised if you had issues with Bowens or Elinchrom units... )
To be fair, I strongly suspect this is an issue with the flash equipment you were using... and not the K10D

Matt

I disagree.
Give the guys at Asahi Photo a call, and try Pentax as well. I don't reckon it will cost that much to repair - looks a nice clean break and the outer casing isn't that expensive
Matt

Actually I have the 1.7x AF converter that doesn't get nearly enough use...

If anyone wants to buy it at anywhere near that price, they are more than welcome
Might eBay it in a few weeks.... to help fund a few things
Matt

Well... it's possible. BUT whatever you do, don't just connect the hotshoe onto the Pentax!! You're more likely to pop the C or N unit (the pin outs are completely different).

The only common denominator between units is the centre pin.

You need some kind of isolating adapter that you can fit between the body and the flash - I've seen mostly plastic "cubes" that are designed for providing a PC-style flash socket. Some of these maintain the centre pin. But whether you'll actually find one is another thing...

...if the C or N unit doesn't mind being connected to older cameras with just the centre pin then that broadens the choice of adapters (you can use mostly metal ones too).

Hope that makes sense!
Matt

I've used Cokin P and HiTech P-sized.
Both tend to accentuate red/magenta - especially if you stack two or more filters.

I now have Cokin Z-Pro sized and they are much better than the P-series. However, there is still a very faint tinge of red when stacking two. I understand that the Lee filters don't suffer from that.

But, as I've said before, the Z-Pro filters are delicate and very easy to get marks and scratches on. I've already scuffed £45 worth of filters But I can live with the marks... they generally don't get in the way. (I've heard the Lee's are harder... but of course they are probably THE most expensive!!)

Actually, for some images the red tinge helps somewhat And of course you can always Photoshop it out very quickly and easily

Matt

And to add to this - as I mentioned in my post, the K10D is the only one that uses a losslessly compressed PEF format. (This is because it has a much faster CPU and can cope with the job of squishing the data.)

All the others store the PEF directly (the *ist-D creating the largest file size).

Matt

Actually, the RAW format is 12-bit.
The *ist-D stored the 12-bit data inside a 16-bit space (wasting 4-bits which were always zero).
The *ist-Ds and other 6Mp cameras used the 12-bits as-is and packed them - hence their PEF formats were smaller than the ist-D.
The K10D added lossless Huffman encoding to squeeze the filesize down more (it could that because it has a much faster CPU compared to the other cameras).

The RAW converter takes the 12-bits per photo-site (not exact a pixel), applies some serious maths (because the photo-sites are arranged in sets of four: green, red, green, blue) to reconstruct the full image and then:

* It can output to 8-bit JPG (which incidentally throws a lot of the blue channel information away)
* It can output to 8-bit TIFF (which is better than JPG because you have 256 level of each of Red, Green and Blue available).
* It can output to 16-bit TIFF

In the first two cases, Photoshop (or Elements) will load the image into the PC and allow editing in 8-bit image space.

In the second case, Photoshop provides a reduced feature set to allow editing in 16-bit space.

To be honest, unless you are doing some really, really serious image manipulation you will be just absolutely fine with an 8-bit image

If you have big problems with dynamic range and the like you are better off learning to use the RAW converter more, and possibly to output two images from the one RAW file and blend in Photoshop.

Hope that's not too confusing
Matt

EDIT: Crossed in the ether with George