saw this a while back, its a lot of fun for a while. Nice find

yup, caught me out the first couple of times as my DL2 has a 2 stage button, but it's perfectly normal for a K10D. After getting used to it I now much prefer the soft touch approach.

just wanted to chime in agreeing with most of what lenscape said, although personally I much prefer Gnome to KDE, each to his own. Great thing with Linux is you get to pick your window manager rather than being stuck with explorer pah.

Hugin is awesome, I've even managed to get reasonable stitches out of images which weren't even taken from the same spot. That program is incredible.

how can they possibly justify that price when the current price for a K10D with kit lens in Jessops is £100 less?

when you consider that about 14 months ago I bought the same kit with Pentax badges on for £600 from a well known high street photographic retailer, and was very pleased with the deal I got.....

The GX-1L is the same as the *istDL2 IIRC, should make a fine second kit. I currently use my DL2 as secondary body to my K10D and it works very well. Usually I leave the 18-55 on the DL2 and whatever specialist lens (macro or long tele) seems most useful on the K10D. Saves a lot of high speed lens changes when I'm trying to take a landscape and an Eagle flies over!

fair enough, it's obviously possible via a little electric cleverness to get an output voltage lower than the cell voltage (reference the Lithium AA cells, Li cell voltage is 3V, they output 1.5). Uniross or a similarly well known and respected brand with the aformentioned guarantee I might be convinced to try, anything else I would steer well clear.

I can confirm that the Uniross Hybrios are excelent. They seem to take a couple of charges to achieve useful capacity, but don't be put off. Once they get all woken up they last for yonks (thats an official SI unit of time you know!).

The camera manual recommends specifically against rechargeable CRV-3 batteries. This is because the native voltage of a Li-Ion cell (rechargeable lithium) is 3.7V and the camera is designed for 3V per battery.

You want to be using either one shot Lithium CRV-3s or NiMH AA rechargeables. Either will give good battery life, the lithiums are a bit lighter and more resilient in the cold but a lot more expensive (though I would expect that you could get them cheaper than $50 a pop!, they are about £7 here).

It is possible that the extra voltage from the CRV3R's has permanently fried your camera, in which case you're pretty stuffed because even if it's still under warranty Pentax will probably just say "we told you so" because you've used batteries they specifically said not to use. If you do try to get a replacement out of them, make sure it doesn't have CRV3-R batteries in it when you send it in!

Ken, I don't think that really answers his question. He's asking why the camera ISNT asking for a focal length even though the lens is too old to set it automatically.

Richard,
You may want to check the following:

1: SR is switched on
2: you are changing lenses with the camera turned off (the menu only comes up automatically when you turn the camera on with a non-auto lens)
3: the custom functions are set up correctly to allow using old lenses. It's something like "Allow use of Aperture Ring".

Hope this helps

mmm I think I shall jealously guard my 50-200 from now on, I seem to have an unusually good one