Hi Ken

The 18mm and the 24mm benefit from stopping down, the 50mm and 70mm are a different thing altogether and are fine wide open at f2.8, as is the 20 - 40mm zoom, if you can find one, but they all benefit from f4 or smaller of course. I have seen no trace of CA in any of my 110 lenses, but they all need a lens hood, they all flare easily.

Looking forward to your pics, might do some myself as we have Sun!! For the first time in a few weeks.

The Hoodman Lupe has diopter adjustment just like your optical viewfinder. You can adjust it for use with or without your glasses.

Good point, but I wonder just how much the people that care about Pentax (and you and me) is in control of these decisions, they had Hoya and now Ricoh at least pulling some of the strings, unfortunately it may be that Pentax might not be fully in charge of it's own destiny anymore and hasn't been for a while. Hope I'm wrong.

The K-01 has all the hallmarks of a 'committee decision' a camel is a horse designed by a committee LOL, so many compromises it loses it's direction, may be that was why Pentax hired a designer - it didn't work. They got a 'camel' of a camera, it's a thoroughbred camel, but it's not a horse.

C'mon guys where else can you buy a camera with the same sensor as a K5 for £239 body only?

Don't get me wrong I hate the design too, Pentax didn't do themselves any favours by hiring a designer to design a 'brick', you have to grip it tightly to hold it, it's tiring to use, unlike their DSLR cameras which have the deep finger grip and mould themselves to your hand.

They didn't include a remote socket, understandable on a Q, a glaring omission on 'the brick'. Not only that, they didn't implement the IR to take bracketed shots as they did on the Q, if Pentax is reading this, please, please implement it in a final firmware upgrade, I shoot a lot of HDR.

I got around the no viewfinder problem (and it is a problem) by using a Hoodman Lupe virtually permanently attached, now it resembles a medium format camera and has similar output with a decent lens, I also use this on my Q which looks even more incongruous. But it works a treat, a large bright viewfinder and you get the third point of contact which helps to hold the camera steady, I was the only person last week that could focus my Manual lens in the dark conditions, focus peaking still worked, everybody else with optical viewfinders had problems.

It has weird P-TTL (I had to update the firmware of my Metz flashguns to use it).

But even with all these things I can forgive it as the image quality it outputs is superb. Last week I went on a dark site with our club to take 'Painting with Light' pictures, I'd been using it to take shots for eBay and left it in low res Jpeg (I know - I blame old age), but the images are all very useable, which was a pleasant surprise, even at an ISO of 800 all the shots are clean with no noise (and I've looked), pretty impressive.

On a tripod, (with the one IR remote reservation above) it is the usual Pentax joy to use.

An example of a composite from low res Jpegs from last week

I've never even installed the Pentax software, Silkypics is no match for Photoshop or Elements.

I have found the Yongnuo RF-602 Radio Triggers 100% reliable, manual mode only for flash sync.

With the relevant cable from the receiver to the cameras remote socket (2.5mm stereo jack plug) they will trigger your camera remotely too with both half press (for auto focus) and full press (for taking the picture). Range around 100 Mts.

Most Pentax cameras have a 'Catch in Focus' function built in




Which may work for you. You need a cable release with a shutter lock function.

Not true, the only thing that effects DOF is Scale Ratio, sometimes called Magnification Ratio which is how many times your sensor would fit into the frame you are photographing.

If you know the Scale Ratio and Aperture you can read the DOF off a look up table.




How you got to that Scale Ratio and what lens, close up filter, bellows, reversing ring etc. is immaterial. With a 50mm Macro lens from 2 Inches away or with a 500mm lens on a set of bellows from around 10 feet away, if your framing the same shot with the same Aperture, DOF will be exactly the same. Focal length only determines how far you are from the subject to frame the shot.

The smaller the sensor is the lower the Magnification Ratio needs to be than if you were using a larger sensor, the lower the Magnification Ratio the greater the width of the DOF you'll get.

Even the effects of Aperture is Scale Ratio, this time how may times the Aperture would fit into your sensor (Apertures are nearly always smaller than the sensor) the smaller the Aperture the wider the DOF as it reduces the effects of the lens/sensor combination.

DOF is all sensor size related.

To find the different crop factor for different sensor/film sizes it's easier to use the dimension of the diagonal (if easier is the right word)

The diagonal of the 35mm format is around 43.25mm (I say around as different manufacturers used slightly different sizes for the height, it's normally cited as 24mm X 36mm, but most manufacturers used 25.17 X 36 to make the most use of the film), for 110 film it's 22.05mm and for our System Q it's 7.666mm. Which makes sense of Pentax'es choice of focal length for their 110 lenses

On a 110 camera;-

18mm becomes a 38mm

24mm has the same field of view as a 48mm lens.

and 50mm equals a 100mm lens in 35mm format.

The crop factor for the 110 cameras is 2 times


When we come to the Q we get

18mm becomes a 99mm lens

24mm has the same field of view as a 132mm lens

and 50mm equals a 275mm in 35mm format.

The crop factor for the Q is, as we all know 5.5 times.

What this means for macro on a Q is you be further away from the subject and the even better news is you have a wider depth of field.

Should make no difference, every camera is calibrated to the same standards.

Chris