I have a multitude of film SLRs. True the *ist DL2 gets used an awful lot more than they do, but sometimes film can be fun.

Also consider the situation I found myself nearly in this summer:

Terrorists have screwed up the air travel system so you can't have hand baggage

You're flying Ryan Air who are notoriously nasty to hold baggage, and a larger than normal proportion of Hold bags are going missing

If you take a camera, it has got to fly cargo class....do you risk your DSLR in the hold? or do you dust off the MZ-S? (or in my case Z50-P)

A film camera still makes a great backup body for places where you can't or wont take your DSLR.

facinating, you learn something new every day!

can the MZ-3 not do aperture control from the body? the MZ-7 can (though I admit I don't use it much because I find the ring faster)

Matt, don't dispair, the 80-320 is a nice lens but once your 50-200 arrives you wont miss it too much. The 50-200 is a thing of beauty, and it makes my 80-320 feel very clunky.

I took mine out for it's first real test this afternoon. I am in love.

I don't know if its the SR, the focusing system, something to do with the new sensor or a combination of all of the above but this camera just LOVES my Jappanese built Zeiss 75-300. I've always thought this lens was alright but not special, but on the K10D it's tack sharp even wide open. I can't wait to try my 80-320.

Sv mode is a dream come true, program shift on the back and ISO on the front and I have all the control I could want at the tips of my fingers. For those more difficult situations I have HP mode set to program shift on the back wheel and EV compensation on the front. The whole camera is just genius! I can't get over how much you can customise the controls to your personal way of working.

my only desire so far is to be able to have the camera use the same ISO in all modes (except TAv of course). Anyone know if that's possible? Edit: Ahhh I see, it DOES do that except for Sv and TAv. I don't suppose theres any way of having Sv change the main ISO setting.

Tim, what you fail to realise is that if the lovely if rather misguided people out there who shoot Kanikons were to all see the light tomorrow, the rest of us wouldn't be able to get hold of the good stuff for MONTHS. Look how long it took to get K10Ds widely available WITHOUT the Kanikon crowd getting in the way.


I wonder how long it will be before Sigma and friends start putting HSM motors into Pentax mount lenses. I guess since Sigma tend to reverse engineer everything they can't do much until Pentax manage to get the new DA* lenses out the door.

if I understand Matts setup correctly, it's exactly like using hyper program except that he doesn't have to go through a menu to change the ISO. I can imagine this being pretty useful since with my DL2 I quickly learned the button sequence to change the ISO without taking my eye from the finder. Having that on an E-dial would be very useful.

look you lot, this just isn't fair

I'm having a hard time holding onto my wallet as it is, I very nearly got into my car and drove to Watford today

I'm not sure how much longer I can resist




/me wanders off chanting
"The *ist DL2 is a wonderful camera
It does not need upgrading
It takes lovely photos.....

if you use the DCRAW command line RAW processor (originally for Linux but I think it's been ported to windows now) there is an option which pulls out the JPEG contained within the RAW file. Useful if you just want to quickly create some thumbnails without having to fully process each file.

I don't trust Samsung as a company, I've been stung by their tech support a couple of times and will be very wary before buying from them again.