Increasing shutter speed won't help as the flash is a fixed duration... You need to increase the f-stop of your lens... Is the camera set up for this? (Is 'Using Aperture Ring' set to 'Permitted' and are you in 'M' mode? Otherwise the aperture will always be wide-open)...

You can also reduce the flash power settings in the menu.

I had a nice chat to some of the 'Occupy Birmingham' people on Saturday. They were a very small group, and had been enclosed, along with nearly all of Victoria Square, in security fencing. The reason? An EDL protest planned the same day, which caused the whole city centre to go on lock-down, swarming with thousands of police and riot vans.

I use the forum the same on a PC and my android (and my previous Sony Erricson phone). I stay signed in. I have www.pentaxuser.co.uk/forum/recent-activity bookmarked so I go straight to that page.

That advert certainly wouldn't put me off applying. They probably just aren't aware of Pentax DSLRs.

Thanks John. I was actually talking about the in-camera sharpening, which I don't find to my taste - tree branches etc having a white halo all round them. See 1:1 crop below:




I would be interested to know if the RS1000/1500 actually does have the ability to reduce that sharpening!

I tried reducing the image file to a normal web size, and it still looked oversharpened, you wouldn't want to add any more to it.

(I have my own regimen for sharpening for web: I use a much smaller radius but a higher amount, which works very well for me).

Looking at some of the cheap Optio compacts (RS1500 etc) as a pocket snapper on holiday, but looking at some of the online image samples, there seems to be a lot of sharpening with halos visible even at reduced web sizes, and creating a 'stained glass window' effect viewed at 1:1.

My question is, can the in-camera sharpening settings be toned down? And does this improve image quality or does it turn to mush without this high level of processing?

Excellent shots Ted, they really capture the hubbub of the place.

Maybe it's cheaper to process bank payments... I can't see there's anything 'shady' going on.

GMT all year round? Sunrise would be at about 3.45am in midsummer! What a waste, and you'd throw away an hour of lovely evening sunshine in the evening - when it's not raining of course.

I'd sooner go for BST all year round... dark mornings are more acceptable than leaving work in pitch darkness every day, and at the weekend, those of us who reward ourselves with a lie-in will have more of the day left!

I had a feeling that they were still using a very similar sensor to the K7. Which when you think of it, is actually pretty much the same as the one in the K20D. That sensor's coming on for four years old now!

Ooof! I really must disagree with that. The K5 is on a par with the D7000 in ISO performance. And the surely K5's has other qualities that we love, apart from the ISO performance.

Inconveniently not made by Canikon - what kind of talk is that?!

But you are right that putting what is essentially the K7 sensor in a K5 would be bizarre! Just bring forward more K7 stocks and preserve the K5's reputaution for ISO performance.