not totally sure about the 55-300 or the 35mm SDM but I'm pretty sure I've seen a roadmap including the 17-70 before.

I know there is the 60-250SDM, looks likely to be a fine lens. The problem I see (and it's not just limited to Pentax) is that we're going to be stuck with a huge gap in lens prices.

Look at the current lineup for longish zooms,

you've got about 3 options new, 5 or 6 if you include second hand, in the £100-£200 bracket. These lenses are fine, but they aren't very fast (4.5-5.6) and generally get a bit soft by 300mm.

If you have tons of cash, theres the Sigma 100-300F4 and the DA* 60-250 will be along shortly (we hope), presumably at a similar price ~£750. That is, IF you can even get hold of the Sig in Pentax K.

What I would really like to see, and suspect strongly we aren't going to get, is a middle of the road ~100-300 with reasonable optical qualities all the way to 300 for something like £300-400. F4.5-5.6 is actually pretty much fast enough if the lens is good enough to be used wide open.

I think the reason the 18-250 doesn't have SDM is it's more or less a rebadged Tamron. Tamron don't have ultrasonic motor technology, so neither does the 18-250.

It's a bit disappointing that it looks like the 55-300 wont have it though. Kind of a long focal range too, nearly 6x, I would have prefered to see something a little more modest in terms of focal ratio with good image quality throughout. Still, it remains to be seen what this lens will be capable of, and since it doesn't even have a guesstimate at availability timescale I think we'll be waiting a while.

I'd say the other corner on the sky is blown out by the presence of the sun, washing out the vignette. My 18-55 suffers from this at 18mm quite a bit. One more reason to save up for the 16-45 I guess.

no problem. We are all learning, and of course if you don't use the Pentax software it's something you'd never notice.


with regards to the difference between RAW and JPEG, I agree the difference is pretty academic in a lot of cases, and if all the settings on the camera are spot on then the JPEG will be very good. The K10D is quite capable of producing exhibition quality A3s in JPEG mode, as our own John Riley is so adept at proving.

I'm just a little bit slow, I like to concentrate on composition, shutter speed, dof etc when I'm in the field and leave such things as white balance until later

not 100% correct,

the RAW image itself is unaffected it is true, but it does contain the data of what the camera was set to. You may notice I refer to using the Pentax Lab software specifically and not SilkyPix or any other RAW processor.

The Pentax Lab software picks up the camera settings from the RAW file and will default to processing the file as it would have been processed by the Camera.

The defaults are saved to the RAW file as just that, defaults which you can change or not as you see fit.


The above does work, it's the way I used to work when I ran Windows and it's the only thing I miss using UFRAW under Linux vs PentaxLab under Windows.

I always advocate setting the camera to RAW mode with a default setting which produces pleasing results most of the time.

I find +1 contrast +1 saturation natural tone suites my tastes, but whatever combination produces results you like is good.

I say this because by doing it this way you can batch process most of your images in the Pentax Lab software without sacrificing the option to play with the RAW to your hearts content if the need should arise.

are we talking a RAW file here?

DCRAW has the ability to strip out the embedded JPEG from PEF files. I use it for thumbnailing, but the image is pretty good quality and full resolution. It's about what you'd get shooting JPEG on full size 2 stars.

DCRAW is a command line app, I think there's a windows/DOS version, but if you have trouble drop me a PM, I'd be happy to extract it for you.

SRS as mentioned above (you could eyeball some cool Pentax gear while you're there) or Campkins in Cambridge have also been very good to me and often match Jessops prices.

Bit of a run from London, but not too bad and worth it for the decent service.

and if you're a PC user, here's how I do it (not that I do it that often)

go to www.photobucket.com

you will need to set up an account, but these are free and it's pretty painless.

log in, you are presented with a gallery page. At the top is an upload thinger.

hit a browse button, find your file on your computer.

click upload

once your picture is uploaded, it appears in your gallery with code snippets below it for you to copy and paste. All you have to do is copy the one marked "img" and paste it into a post here exactly as it is.

just to prove it works, here's one I made earlier.

if you compare the data on the M40 and DA40 on Bojidar's K mount page, they appear to be very similar designs but not identical.

I'd say the DA is certainly derived from the M, but it is at least an "improved" version. The M varient makes no mention of Aspherical lens elements for example.