if your graphics card is happy with widescreen resolutions (not all are) then I'd take the widescreen. gives you a bit more space to tuck your pallets and toolbars down the side while still being able to see the main image.

according to my quick calculations, with 2GB/month of bandwidth you could download one image the size of those I post every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It may also interest you to know that the reply form I am entering this post into totals 53KB, approximately half the size of my standard web photos.

I really don't think you have anything to worry about.

you're right of course, my bad!

let us know which way you go Shayt, and how you get on. I think there are a few people around here eyeing up the Bigma and friends, I know I am.

I have not actually used either, but from 100-300 my money would certainly be on the 100-300 as the better lens. Even with a 1.4x TC I would expect it to be at least as good, since a 1.4x TC isn't usually too bad quality wise. It's the 2x ones which really start to cause fun.


Now the bad bit,

If you get a modern TC (I suggest the Sigma EX one since you're getting a sigma lens) then AF will work. However, the TC doesn't change the focal length reported to the camera, so SR probably wont work that well.

It's possible that if you cover the 7th contact on the TC then you will be able to set focal length manually as you do with old lenses, not sure if that would work or what else might stop working though.

Pentax if you're reading this please can we have a "I am using a teleconverter" menu option in a future firmware? Surely it wouldn't be too hard to get the camera to multiply the reported FL by 1.4/1.7/2? Or at least could we have a "manual override" so we can set the FL manually?



There is another thing which I would consider. Pentax are about to release their first SDM lenses. Sigma like to reverse engineer things, so they can't do HSM in Pentax mount until they can get hold of a DA* lens to pull apart. I e-mailed Sigma a while ago and they said they hadn't heard anything from Japan about doing HSM PK lenses, but for my part I'll be giving it a few months before I spend big money on a long Sigma only to have them release an HSM version the next day.

not to mention Beer, Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy

their most annoying trick is "OMG! a car is coming towards me! I should run away!" so they do. Straight away, down the middle of the road so you are forced to either deliberately run them over or slow down to scared Pheasant pace.

They do seem to have some difficulty remembering that they can fly. Perhaps it's race memory since those who take off when scared tend to get shot?

nice capture, I've never even SEEN a red let alone photographed one.

There is a squirrel living in Fitz college Cambridge (my college) which appears to be a Hybrid (which I didn't think happened). He is the size and shape of a grey but is very definitely red in colour. I've seen him a couple of times now so I'm going to hide out down there with my camera and see if I can catch a photo or two.

Pentax WP series are pretty good, images are nice enough for a compact and they are more or less invulnerable.

now THAT is a real advantage, and one I confess I hadn't thought of.

The main reason for my distrust of Samsung is from an incident of that type. My Dad had a Sammy laptop which was supposed to come with MS Works Suite. Alas the Works Suite disks were warped and didn't spin.

We called Samsung, who said it was MS's problem

We called MS, who said it was Samsungs problem

So I installed Open Office on it for him, for his purposes it was more than enough.

That lappy was the epitome of poorly designed mass market cheap as chips PCs as well, it got to a point where it would crash on startup better than 50% of the time. Dad replaced it with a new Toshiba (which is the complete opposite), and I installed Linux on the Samsung. Interestingly under Linux the machine is not only stable as a rock, but it's network card has started working again despite having been officially declared dead by Samsung engineers 18 months ago.

well I don't pretend to have a seamless workflow, but that's not my software's fault nearly so much as I haven't got the kinks ironed out of my own methods yet.

I do resent the totally unfounded and repeated implication that my PC is unstable and/or unreliable. She is 6 years old and in that time I believe I could count the number of times she has crashed on my fingers, under either WindowsXP or Linux.

As I said earlier, I don't buy rubbish. People may be forgiven for believing that PC's are unreliable if their only experience is of Packard Bell/eMachines/Time/whatever other rubbish PC World are kicking out at the moment, but please don't tar my machine with that brush. There is a world of difference between a machine thrown together from the cheapest available parts and sold to people who actually believe processor speed is measured in Gigabites (note the intentional misspelling), and a hand built machine who's every component has been selected by hours of painstaking research. And by every component I mean starting with the CPUs and ending with the 40mm auxiliary fan attached to the northbridge.

I don't suggest that a PC is the right machine for everyone. Indeed it seems to me that if you're going to buy an off the shelf box then Mac is as good as any and better than most, with the obvious advantage of a Unix based OS as standard. Still I don't like the suggestion which seems to come from some people that those who use PCs are merely misguided people who haven't seen a Mac in action. There are two sides to every argument.

On a side note I would advise anyone to install firewall and AV software, the increased usage of alternative OSs such as Linux and OSX has brought with it an increase in viruses for those systems. While it is tempting to believe that our OS of choice is so inherently superior to Windows that viruses are impossible, the truth is mainly that most virus writers up to now have targeted Windows because there are more target machines. As numbers of Linux and MacOS machines increase, so they become more viable targets for malware authors.

Still this thread is getting way off topic, it was supposed to be a "look, PEF files can now be processed in Linux without too much hassle" and seems to have degenerated into a PC vs Mac flame war.