That's a coincidence Bill, I started out my photography interest with the A200 and to be honest I found it pretty good, as you say high-iso was quite poor but in good light it produced excellent images, I still have one or two on my website!!

I also quite liked the idea of the EVF, although the A2 EVF was superior to the A200 - live histogram in the viewfinder and being able to see the scene as it actually appears were very useful and as that technology moves on I'd certainly welcome that ability in a DSLR.

The other thing I remember is that the A200 fixed lens (28-200) was very well respected and when I first bought my K10D with the kit lens I was quite disappointed with the initial results - quite a few bridge camera fixed lenses outperform the kit lenses supplied with DSLRs.

PM sent ref FA35mm

Personally I think DSLRs in their current state won't exist for much longer - mirrors are on the way out & EVFs are coming for sure, the technology is still being perfected but it's getting better all the time. Interchangeable lenses are here to stay though, probably mainly due to the profits that manufacturers make from them!!

Pentax's old partner Samsung is very shrewd at spotting new market opportunities and I think it's the reason they've left the "pure" DSLR market

Simon

Payment received - bag now sold

Email on its way to you now

Not neccesarily...you have a PM

Simon

I'm selling my "as new" Tamrac Aero Speed Pack 75 backpack. The only thing that's slightly different from new is that I've blacked-out the Tamrac logos on the 2 badges. Bought from SRS in February of this year and only used a couple of times.

It's an excellent "quick access" backpack, only reason I'm selling is that I needed something larger for hiking so bought the Primus AW.

Here's a link to the Tamrac website with more info, only difference is the model I'm selling is in "all black" without the colour strip shown in the photo...

http://www.tamrac.com/3375.htm

If anyone wants to see photos of the actual bag I'll post a couple if requested.

Asking price is £35 including standard royal mail delivery - any questions please ask

Simon

I'm about the same as a year ago I think - whilst I'm lucky enough to get out and about a bit it's often primarily for hiking and so I don't really spend as much time as I would like exploring compositions and techniques - I'm not always spending my time in the ideal lighting for landscape photography either.

Simon

Pretty much the same process John just that I leave the unsharpened .tiff at native resolution then resize/sharpen depending upon final use.

I output for both John - I use ACR for adding capture sharpening, I now set the slider to 45 on all K5 shots, I then use "Photokit sharpener" plugin to add output sharpening - it has pre-optimised settings depending upon output requirements, I often tweak this by changing the layer opacity.

I've also noticed when using the "fill" slider in ACR the K5 images react differently to the K20D, difficult to explain but I've found so far that I'm unable to apply as much as I did for the K20D which is a suprise as I thought exactly the opposite would be true:

It's early days yet anyway, I've only taken a handful of shots with the K5 so need to process a few more shots before I can decide on the best approach - all adds to the fun of a new camera!!

Simon