I've heard that too, though I have yet to get my hands on a *istD/DS screen to confirm it.

All I know is my K10D gets its metering wrong with most non-A lenses. The only exceptions I have yet found are my two 300mm primes (one cheapo Tamron 300 F5.6, one pro level Tamron 300 F2. which both meter pretty close to spot on at all apertures despite being effectively M series.

My *istDL2 is spot on with all lenses except in very dark conditions where it starts to underexpose.

any autofocus lens will work perfectly (except power zoom which died with the Z series, though even Power Zoom lenses will work fine in manual zoom mode).

Manual focus lenses with an A setting will be fine

those without an A setting will have limitations on their metering. If he has a lot of non-A manual focus lenses then he is better off with a K100D because the stop down metering is better. If most of his lenses are modern and he knows his way around the Av, Tv and M modes of a proper SLR then the K10D is far superior and a steal at it's current price.

Same here, full K mount compatibility would move the K20D right to the top of my wish list faster than any other feature they could invent.

I suspect the thing is that most people who want one already have a 70-300 of some type (I include in this 80-320, 100-300 and all other variations on this range).

The 55-300 will be an interesting lens for a lot of people who are just starting out, and for some people who are upgrading to digital from Pre-AF cameras, but those of us who had Z or MZ series bodies probably already have one.

Also since all of these lenses are vapourware at the moment, why dream about a 55-300 F4.5 consumer lens when you can dream about a 60-250 F4 DA*.

I have found that high quality 7 element teleconverters from the respected lens manufacturors produce very acceptable results when coupled with prime lenses

The Tamron SP converter in Adaptall mount in particular produces superb results, although obviously it is limited to use with adaptall lenses.


Pentax TCs are generally superb, as you would expect, but in reality are almost impossible to get because they are no longer made and those who have them tend to hang on to them.

I used to use NASLite, since at the time it had a better feature set than FreeNAS (havn't looked recently so either or both have probably been upgraded since)

It is a very similar idea, boots from CD or USB stick (latter recommended since it leaves another IDE channel free for a HDD) and just shares all the HDDs it finds across the network.

The system worked great with both Windows (samba) and NFS networking, but it had one flaw.

If the server was not shut down properly, about 30% of the time it would loose the partition table on at least one hard drive. I could never identify why this happened, and although other users reported not having the problem it occured on all 4 machines with which I used the software (different CPUs, motherboards and chipsets). On each occasion I was able to recover all my data by plugging the hard drives into a machine running full fledged Linux, where they would mount properly, but this was a hassle and a worry I didn't need.

I now run a machine on Ubuntu 7.04 server edition which I have configured to do broadly speaking the same thing, with the added bonus of automatic timed backups, and in the event of a power cut I don't loose all my data.

I would strongly recommend you test any NAS system you impliment in all conceivable error states before you trust it with vital data.

Well if it does fall in the lake, give me a shout, I've got 2 of them and a Z20. All in good order (so I can't bring myself to bin them) but they just don't sell so they sit in my cupboard, waiting for the day they come in handy.

off topic somewhat but you can't beat an SFX with F35-70 as an "I don't care if it falls in the lake" camera.

every piece of junk has its uses.

some really good entries for a really good theme

well done Daniel and others, very glad I didn't have to judge it!

A self portrait




If memory serves, a K10D with 28mm lens wide open for 30 seconds at ISO 800.