With respect, the *ist-D series of cameras use exactly the same sensor as the Nikon D100, the Minolta 7D, and probably a multitude of other too - the sensor is actually made by Sony and is a very fine one.

If you shoot JPG you probably need to do one of the following:
1) Increase the settings in camera
2) Sharpen on the PC (preferred) with something like Unsharp Mask.

If you shoot RAW you will get the best out of the camera, by far, but it takes time and effort to master.

Pentax take a conservative view of in-camera sharpening with JPG - one I whole heartedly agree with. Once you agressively sharpen in camera you have effectively introduced artifacts that are a complete pain to remove. Leaving the image softer in JPG and allowing the sharpening to take place on the PC provides much greater control, and means you are not corrupting the image as much.

I have the *ist-D and the JPGs always need a sharpen on the PC. However, I shoot RAW mode always now and produce consistently high resolution results (even without FA* lenses, which I wish I could afford!!).


Check out the other threads here for more info.
Hope that helps,
Matt

You mean you can turn off the flash???!

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0512/05120601sigma_10-20mm.asp

Wow! The street price of this lens is much more realistic for seriously wide angle work. And the quality's pretty excellent too (maybe not up to Pentax )

That gives 15mm equivalent

Matt

Me too
Only now am I being tempted back to the "dark side" and the Sigma 10-20mm that's just been announced (mostly because it's far more affordable than the Pentax - but maybe that'll change given a few months!)
Matt

The 24-90 is definitely much better than the 28-70, but then it costs more.

Just watch out for the 28-70 - don't buy one without seeing it! Some of them suffer from some kind of problem with the rear elements where everything goes foggy. I had two go on me, and just bought a third (which is ok for now). Pretty cheap though

Matt

Flink,
Originally I wondered what all the fuss was about, and tried (and bought) other lenses first. Then I had a little windfall and bought a new 24-90 for the *ist-D. Now I understand

I have found the 24-90 to be a consistently good performer. Colour and flare control are wonderful. Very slightly soft (compared to the DA 16-45) but sharpens up very nicely with Photoshop.

There's just a certain "something" about the lens. The out-of-focus rendition is lovely, and the bokeh is very nice. I took some "snaps" at a wedding not long after I bought it, and it fully justified the expense My candids were good enough to class as pro-wedding photography. It's now one of my main lenses, and normally the lens of choice if I can only take one

Hope that helps!

Matt

Not sure if this has anything to do with it:
http://www.pentax.co.jp/english/news/information/20051130.html

Those images look very overexposed as well as having "scan-lines" in them. Very strange. I'd say it's a camera problem.

Matt

Correct me if I'm wrong, Kimbo, but it sounds like your SD cards are not showing up at all. This is a different situation to "I need to recover my lost images", and the file recovery tools probably won't help.

However, I seem to remember that the Lexar recovery software does also have card verification tools that will put them through a little exercise and check them out (at least my CF Pro WA cards did).

The offer of posting one for an post-mortem is still open

Matt

Kimbo,
Here are a few links:

http://www.cnetx.com/format/download.asp - this seems to be what you want, but runs on a Pocket PC.

http://s-k-tools.com/sktools/feat.html - Pocket PC app that appears to be able to format SD cards with special settings. Might be worth a look

http://www.simpletech.com/support/support_ts-mmc.php

http://pocketpcmag.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=17921 - info to do with formatting within Windows for Pocket PC devices. Best read the whole thing.


"Secure Digital" is not to do with reliability of data, but rather CRM (Content Rights Management). SD has the ability to protect copyrighted material

Failing that, send me a PM and you can post one of the duds to me and I'll have a play around

Matt

Kimbo,

AFAIK, SD cards are different to CompactFlash in that they have a simpler "controller" in them. CompactFlash looks much like an ATA disk drive, and the controller takes responsibility for bad block management.

However, with SD cards the camera (or other device) has to take responsibility for bad block management, block replacement and the like. All flash chips have failures - CF controllers have varying degrees of detection and correction (so it's difficult to compare like for like). SD cards will have failures, but it's normally in the region of about 1% failure after 100,000 erase/write cycles.

Such flash devices are normally marked at the factory with their bad block list (bad blocks have a byte marked differently).

I have a Viking SD card I have used in my Pocket PC for some time, and this hasn't been a problem at all.

Then, on top of the "raw" flash controlling there's the file system. You may find there's an incompatibility between the Trust and the other devices in terms of file system, or a bug in the Trust firmware (personally I wouldn't rate Trust as a brand to trust too highly )

Not sure what you can do to recover the SD card... if anything. I don't know whether there's a low-level format and verify for SD. It's quite likely, since the electronic interface is extremely low level in SD. I'll have a Google and see what I come up with.

[edited: checking the SD spec for more detailed info]

Matt