no, at least not that I've seen with my particular camera.

well I tried something a bit silly (I have a tendancy to do that to discover the limitations of my kit).

This shot was taken at ISO 1600 with -3 stops of exposure compensation




I then took the PEF file and boosted it by 3 stops in Pentax Lab




yes, it's noisey as hell, no, it doesn't look as bad here as it does full size, but there's an awful lot of detail retained there considering it is effectively pushed to ISO 12800

in case anyone is wondering, it's a penny coin wedged into the gap between two of the keys on my keyboard. Shot with a Tamron 90mm macro lens in poor light with SR on, can't actually get much worse.

I would find it extremely irritating if the camera switched back to the P line on its own, I want it to stay where it's put.

The way I use it and have mine set up, yes the TV/AV modes are basically not useful (I have program shift on the back dial and exposure comp on the front), but if you leave the camera on defaults (Tv front dial, Av rear) then switching into Av or Tv mode gives you direct access to exposure compensation via one of the dials.

The 10D is incredibly versitile in the way it will work with you and for you. For this reason any given photog will have modes on it he never uses, but change the settings and/or the way of working a little bit and suddenly those become invaluable.

That is not my impression at all, the JPG rendering is at least as good as that of my *istDL2. My experiance to date implies that the 10D has better metering than the DL2 as well (even though both are 16 segment multi pattern, I guess they changed the pattern) which also allows more reliable JPG shooting since you can more easily do without the exposure latitude available in RAW.

Out of the box it is expected that you will shoot in RAW or at least RAW+JPG, and the defaults reflect that, but you are at liberty to change the recording settings to produce a punchier JPG out of the camera. I have mine set to +1 saturation, +1 contrast since this is what I most often end up doing in RAW conversion

thats like saying "the coffee in this cup may be hot"

You can bet your bottom dollar you'd know about it quick if it wasn't!

thats not a bad idea at all, so Pentax firmware writers! listen! we want an option for program line based on maintaining a hand holdable shutter speed at the reported focal length.

Quite true, but the program line has to be based on something, so why not MTF? It would probably save a lot of faffing around if they just made a program which biases F8 heavily I'll admit, but that is Pentax's choice.

In Sv mode you have finger and thumb control of ISO and Speed/Aperture combination so if you don't like what the program line suggests you can change it in a snap.

MTF program is by no means a killer feature, but as an add on bonus I like it.

it's a bit subjective since it deppends on the conditions of the test so unless lenses have been tested under exactly the same conditions it isn't necessarily valid to compare them.

Generally the results are presented as a graph of MTF against aperture at a given focal length. Invariably there is a peak on that graph somewhere (surprise surprise for most lenses it's somewhere between F5.6 and F11) indicating the best aperture. The idea of MTF program is to bias the exposure to use the apertures where the lens performs best whenever possible.

Same idea as setting Av mode and leaving the lens on F8 unless you need to set something else, but a little more sophisticated.

something like Median Transfer Function

whatever it stands for, it is a measure of lens resolving power

Sigma tend to reverse engineer things. If they can't figure out what something is for, they leave it alone and pray that it works. You can see this if you mount an old Sigma AF lens on a DSLR. Pentax have always encoded the names of their lenses even though AFAIK there was no reason for them to do this before the *istD came along (unless the data back for the Z1-P recorded the lens name?). Hence my Sigma made Zeiss 75-300 claims to be a Pentax SMC 80-210, while my Sigma 28-200 identifies itself as an SMC 35-135.

I therefore suspect that even if the Sigma lenses contain MTF data, it is quite possibly the MTF data for whichever lens they copied the electronics from rather than that of the lens itself.

On this note, has anyone studied/been told what the camera does if it can't get MTF data? does it revert to normal program, assume F8 is best, or what?

thanks for your reply Matt, I figured that would be the case hence I wasn't initially bothered by it, it's when it starts picking combinations like 1/1000th at F4.5 that I start to get a little confused.

I'm going to have to play with it some more I think since MTF-priority generally seems like a very good idea. It's always possible (indeed likely!) that I am doing something stupid and unintentionally telling it to open wide.