I think you are hitting the limits of the metering system, I have the same problem using stop down lenses in low light on both my K10D and DL2, it never selects a shutter speed slower than 1.5 seconds.

I think it's just too dark at that point to get an acurate reading, remember the meter is designed to work with the lens wide open.

he clearly forgot about the verse in the Bible where it says

"the lord thy God is a vengeful god, and he shoots Pentax"

that may not be the way the client sees it

I've done land surveys for clients who didn't want the current occupants to know what was going on. It's not fun. With photography you might have a better shot at getting the pictures without anyone questioning you, but I wouldn't bank on it and people who think they are about to lose their jobs or homes can get pretty unpleasent.

I'd ask for danger money.

I don't think you will regret saving the extra pennys for the 55-300, if you're shooting aircraft you're going to spend a lot of time at 300 and the DA55-300 is the best performer at the long end.

Of course a Pentax brand tin-foil hat would be weather and dust resistant so you could wear it in the shower.......

And if we could isolate the frequency of the government transmissions, Pentax could do us an inverse SMC to maximise the reflection coefficient of said hat.......

acording to Bojidar's K mount page, you are exactly right. The MV1 is 5 grams heavier, has a self timer and can use the ME series motor drives.

Oh and the MV1 came in Silver, although not very often!

I certainly can! the level of detail you can pull out of a stack of 20 or so images of a faint nebula or galaxy is quite staggering and of course there is no technical reason not to use it on "normal" images, I had just never thought of it before. Thank you for the idea!

I'm not sure if Registax can do median as you describe, being an astro oriented program it wont have been designed with removing people from a busy scene in mind but it may be possible. Certainly it can do mean and plain addition (for bringing out faint detail).

put your tin-foil hat back on Father, the government have got into your brain again!

If you want to know why you wont find a "new" K10D anymore, just look back through the forum to the time when they were freshly discontinued. Look for posts by Chris@SRS. He was buying up old stock wherever he could find it and still selling out faster than he could find them.

The K10D is a fantastic camera, but if you want one 2nd hand is the only way you'll get it now.