I rest my case, if slightly late

I'm loving Dan's graduated sky/tree siluette shot. The person who figures out how to properly do "the velvia effect" with digital will make a million.

there's an interesting comparison over on DePressing Review forums showing DA55-300 vs Tamron 70-300 vs DA*300 (obviously the latter included for an ultimate quality standard).

In those shots the Pentax looks slightly sharper than the Tamron with drastically reduced PF. It doesn't match the DA*, but then who ever thought it would?

Of course it's just one comparison and doesn't take sample-sample variation into account on either lens, but on evidence presented so far the Pentax DA 55-300 is looking like it's going on my shopping list

how does the CA compare to the Tamron?

As I understand the complaint against the Tamron 70-300 has always been that it suffers from CA more than the Sigma.

Also, what's the focusing speed like compared to the other two.

Thanks for your thoughts

very interesting Golf, please let us know how you get on!

I don't know how well Silky worked with Linux/WINE when you last tried it, but Ubuntu 7.10+whatever version of WINE is currently in the repositories runs it pretty flawlessly.

I haven't used the Windoze version of UFRAW for a little while, but last time I did it just loaded and ran right off the bat.

Have you tried downloading it again? it might be a bad download.

what files is it missing?

interesting, I am jealous! (SRS still showing stock due soon so I don't get to play with one just yet).

will be very interested in your thoughts.

there's an art to picking where you put your plane of focus too, for example the beatle above would probably look a lot better if the focus was a little closer. I would have aimed to get his close eye and wing as sharp as possible. A lot of the shot would still be outside the DOF, but it probably wouldn't notice so much.

This is why many people say that AF is not very useful in a macro lens, you'll end up manually changing it most of the time anyway.

I assume the camera works properly with other lenses?

Try setting a small aperture and hitting DoF preview (with preview method set to Optical if you don't usually have that). If the lens is stopping down then the view through the viewfinder should darken.

If the lens is not stopping down, take it off the camera and examine the stop down actuator (this is the longest movable prong which sticks out the back of the lens mount). Compare it to a lens which works properly. A weakness of the K mount is that this actuator is not particularly strong and if it becomes bent then it wont engage properly with the camera and the lens wont stop down properly.

and the new topic is Blue.......the special protection is over and the clouds are rolling in already!