the man has a point, if it's a mac you want then don't write it off until you have made sure you can't afford one, you might be pleasantly surprised.

the Intel Core2 chips are the hot ticket for raw power at the moment, although AMD have just slashed the prices of the Athlon X2 chips so they are quite good value ATM.

You can never have too much RAM, but it's easily dropped in at a later date. If the budget is tight I'd go for 2G of RAM and get the other bits just right, then drop in some more RAM later if you need to.

Don't skimp on the PSU, many a fine system has been crippled by an unstable or underpowered power supply. Also a low wattage PSU running at its limits will be less efficient and therefore actually draw more juice than a higher rated unit working easily.

I would steer clear of those. I have no direct experience with this lens, but my experience of cheap long zooms is that they are cheap for a reason. Also F6.7 is technically too dark for AF to work. In fact Pentax tend to under promise and over deliver with their AF so it probably would work most of the time, but it wont be fast and will probably hunt quite a bit. You would be much better off with a Pentax 80-320 or a Sigma 70-300 APO (note the APO, it's important).

another thing, with the advent of Shake Reduction there is yet another reason to avoid old zooms.

Lenses before the F series do not pass their focal length to the camera, so if you want to use SR you have to set it yourself. This isn't too bad if you use primes, since the menu pops up automatically when you turn the camera on and changing lenses with the camera powered off is good practice. However, with a zoom you will have to manually change the focal length every time you zoom in or out. Not ideal.


also faster is not always better. A 300mm F2.8 lens has an aperture 107mm across. Whatever clever things they do to the design, thats one big chunk of glass and it's going to be HEAVY. The more modest 80-320 zoom is only F5.6 at 320mm. It's a little slow, but you'll still be wandering about taking pictures long after the guy with the 300 F2.8 has died of exhaustion.

there are 4 basic generations of K fit lenses

1) no electric contacts, manual focus (Pentax K and M series are examples)

2) with electric contacts and A position on aperture ring, manual focus (Pentax A series)

3) more electric contacts, A position on aperture ring, auto focus (F, FA and D FA)

4) more electric contacts, no aperture ring, auto focus (FAJ and DA)


Non Pentax lenses will also fall into these categorys, at least loosely. An old Sigma lens which has an A position on its aperture ring is likely to act like a Pentax A series for example.

One thing to watch out for with non-Pentax lenses is that some of the old ones are actually designed for the Ricoh version of the K mount. These can jam on Pentax bodys and land you with a hefty repair bill, so caveat emptor.

if, having read this review, any of you 16-45 owners are inclined to skip this obviously inferior lens, I'd be happy to take it off your hands and dispose of it free of charge

I can say 100% certainly that no video camera will ever have a place in my kit bag, unless it is no longer possible to buy a still DSLR and my K10D is broken beyond repair.

Video vs still is a pointless comparison, it's apples and oranges.

here is my suggestion for astro shots

AF is irrelevant since if you ever come across an object in the night sky for which infinity is not the correct setting, the sharpness of your photos will be the least of your worries. The phrase "dear God, it's going to hit us!" springs to mind.

Set the camera to Manual focus and set the focus at infinity.

Unless you are using a really long (500+mm) lens and photographing the full moon, metering will be useless because of the large percentage of black sky. Trial and error is the key to success and you'll eventually get to know what settings are likely to work.

For the moon try F8 and 1/ISO as a starting point

For star fields, try wide open aperture and as long a shutter time as you can, probably ISO 200 although 400 is usable if you want to pick up fainter stars and are already at the longest shutter time you can use.

If you don't want to see star trails, and assuming you don't have a driven equatorial camera mount, keep your shutter speed faster than about 500/focal length.

Use the 2 second delay mode since this will "pre-fire" the mirror to reduce camera shake to a minimum.

The K10D's flash unit doesn't auto-deploy as far as I know, it may complain and flash the flash icon in the viewfinder but just ignore it, you know better.

hope this helps

I have just been outside shooting astro shots at 30 seconds with no flash, no problem.

what exact settings were you using?

PS yes the bright planet near the moon at the moment is Venus.

really? I could have sworn my MZ-7 manual called it Trap focus, still it's been a long time since I read said document so you're probably right.

Apologies to all those I may have offended by this flagrant disregard for correct terminology