Anyone seen the specs on this. What do you think.

This was announced on a forum a few days ago, and appeared on Pentax UK website yesterday.

I am glad that Pentax have enough faith in this product to advertise and market on a more stronger basis than is usual for them. Practically every uk based photo magazine has full page adverts for the DS, and they are even sponsoring competitions with the DS as the prize. When I bought my MZS - just as it came out - there wasn't a single add to be seen anywhere, despite a lot of favourable reviews both tin amateur and professional press. I don't remember any strong advertising when I bought my Z1 either. These were and still are absolutely brilliant cameras and deserve(d) to adopted by a much wider photographic community. The last SLR i remember Pentax having significant advertising on was the P30n. I bought one of those also.

Hopefully all this effort will result in a rush of sales for Pentax. We are already witnessing new sales to people with a collection of kit from other manufacturers, as witnessed on this and other forums. Higher volume of sales makes greater markets for system accesories, along with increased income to pay for R&D, and the Pentax roadmap unveiled recently seems to be hinting at this. More lenses. More flashes. Firmware upgrades. All of these things are to be looked forward to. As much as I love older Pentax primes, new digital based lenses with so called limited appeal would be a great bonus to the artistic community.

So what do you reckon guys. Does the future look brighter?

So Pentax are finally digging in deep to try to establish the DS. Marketing strategies usually the preserve of Nikon and Canon in the DSLR sector comes to your favourite brand and mine. I really hope it does well for them, and I welcome aggressive marketing to help break this great camera. The only problem is, why didn't they inform people of this in advance. I appreciate this may be a reaction to the 350, but if I had known this 2 weeks ago I would have kept the money in my pocket untill now. I would have put the £100 towards a flash or kept it for putting towards the 50-200. I have a little bitter taste in my mouth tonight

Thanks for the info, chaps.
I have tried the uninstall/re-install game, but to no avail. So far I have been just transferring the shots to a new folder in the computer and then accessing them via elements 2. Because of this I have stuck to jpeg, but I would really like to switch to raw mode.

Pentax UK advised me to contact acd systems for advice so I will wait to see what they suggest.

Love the camera though. It just feels like a real camera, and having access to my existing M, A and KAF lenses is a great plus. Backwards compatibility rules

Hi, All

Just received a new *ist DS, after much deliberation and research and although I love the feel of the camera, I am having trouble getting Photo Browser to launch. I am using XP, and when I try to launch the programme, al i get is a windows pop up informing me there is a problem and the programme has to quit.

Has anyone seen this before, or better still do you have any ideas as to a possible resolution

Has anyone else noticed this. I'm a relative newcomer to digital and this site so this may have been covered elsewhere, but:

I have just been having a little play about with my DS with a 75-150 M. I must confess that I haven't read the manual yet, but I was very surprised to notice the following:

With custom setting set to allow the use of aperture settings rather than A and the exposure mode set to M on the dial, if you activate the DOF preview, whilst looking through the viewfinder, the remaining frame counter in the viewfinder turns into a meter, giving recommendations fron -3 to +3 stops. So if you have a shutter speed selected, simply turn on DOF preview, and adjust aperture ring until you get a meter reading of "0". I have had a quick unscientific check on this and exposure seems to be fine. Just like a good old fashioned meter would have done on a camera of the vintage of the lens in question. This is excellent news.

I'm away to get my Lunasix F to check for the meter's accuracy.

I have just pulled an A lens off my MZS to try, and lo and behold, everything seems to be fine if you stay in A mode. Of course once you come off A, the camera switches to open aperture mode, so metering or photography of any kind is a no-no. The lens iris will not respond to any commands whilst in this mode, so you need to switch to manual exposure mode and meter accordingly to use either M lenses or A lenses in any other setting apart from A.

This is a stupid set of commands. The aperture coupling is identical in all of the lenses. Why can the DOF command not function in non A settings?

So by my reckoning it is safe to use DA and FA or A lenses on tha A setting when use of aperture is selected within the custom functions sub set

I have just aquired a DS, and I use it with the custom function set to allow the use of the aperture ring. When in this mode my DA 18-55 closes down to the correct aperture with every photo. No issues here. I will try it with an A lens tomorrow to see if this is any different