took delivery of a K10D for work the other day, fresh from SRS, v1.0 firmware.

I'm guessing the distribution channels are mixed up and it's taking time for the v1.3 equipped bodies to filter through. Doesn't seem unlikely given the mad scramble for Pentax gear there has been since the K10D came out.

Still the flash procedure is painless, just follow the instructions and make sure your battery is fully charged. It's well worth doing.

I would have thought that a little silly since V 1.3 is required for SDM to work. Of course that doesn't mean it isn't true, but it does seem a little stupid of Pentax.

but isn't 1.3 required for the SDM to work?

I used to use Fuji Superia 1600 rated at 1/3 stop slower for fencing photography. Usually I'd be in agreement with KimC, but in the gyms we used to fence in I had to pack a 50 F1.7 AND ISO 1600 to keep the shutter speed up.

my understanding of the situation is thus:

The SMC Pentax-A lens is an ok performer, I've never used one personally but expect normal Pentax late 80s kit zoom performance. Not stellar, not bad.

The Pentax-A and Tak-A lenses are actually identical. The Tak brand was used in the states, while SMC less lenses in the UK were just labeled Pentax-A. These lenses get a lot of bad press but my Dad has taken some stunning shots with his Pentax-A 28-80 so there are good examples although it's likely there are a lot of lemons. The inferior coatings do make them more prone to flare in any case.

My favourite prime ATM is my Tamron 90mm F2.5, which is so good I love it dispite my lack of success so far in getting it an A series adaptall mount.

SMC-A series 50/1.7 comes in a close second, and is better indoors


I'm also playing around with a Tamron 300 F5.6 which I picked up for a song on Ebay a couple of weeks ago. Considering the price I paid for it, it performs pretty well.

Glad to have that confirmed (although of course it would have been nice to have the option for *ist bodies). I had assumed it was the same mistake as has been common on HSM lenses for quite some time. Hopefully the HSM claims will soon cease to be a mistake, but we shall see.

Agreed, my DL2 is fine in daylight and at large apertures and unreliable at small apertures or in very dark conditions.

It is also unreliable with my M42-K mount adaptor, but so are all cameras so I don't blame the DL2 for this.

Interestingly my K10D is absolutely spot on with both my Tamron 300mm prime lenses, even though one is the cheap as chips F5.6 version and the other is the mighty F2.8 SP. I imagine it goes off the rails a bit in low light, but these are not lenses which lend themselves to slow shutter speeds anyway. The same camera produces the errors which have been well documented on this forum with all my Pentax M series lenses and my Tamron 90mm SP F2.5.

yes, but your ME was using the full aperture of the lens to do so and then applying a correction factor based on the selected aperture. The DSLRs actually stop down the lens to take a light reading with M series lenses. Hence if you're shooting with an F2.8 lens set to F8 the ME has 8 times more light to play with than the DSLR in the same situation.

Also the ME's slowest metered shutter speed is 8 seconds, for longer than that you have to use bulb mode. I haven't used my DL2 in low light with an M lens recently but I think it will get down somewhere near there. It should equal the ME since it has the same rated meter operating light levels.

I believe (and this is only a personal hypothesis) that the reason the *ist and K100 become unreliable at really small apertures in stop down is that they are designed to be open aperture metering cameras.

Any metering system is only acurate down to a certain minimum light level, beyond which it will start to go wrong. With my old Ricoh KR5, it was necessary to overexpose by one or two stops in the evening because the light meter was only reliable in full daylight.

If you consider what the camera is doing when you use stop down metering at a small aperture, it isn't surprising that you reach the limits of the metering system faster in stop down mode than you would in full open mode.


The K10D however, just isn't very good at stop down metering.

It should be noted however that all the cameras (or at least both of mine, a K10 and a DL2) are consistent even when they are not acurate. You can learn to adjust for the cameras idiosyncracies with old lenses and still get beautiful results.