My istDS battery gauge is completely useless too. Frequently will switch on the camera, battery reads completely full. Try and take a picture, and it will just die before completing the picture saving with battery empty flashing.

This also happens with batteries straight from charger (rechargeable AAs). I was wondering if my charger is broken, a short-circuit in the camera was draining batteries very fast, or the battery gauge is just plain bad. Either way, I've lost some great shots due to this, was hoping they'd have fixed it by now.

I have a bright green stuck pixel in the middle of my pictures. Get a lot more purple ones when I shoot at higher ISOs or do longer exposures.

I find it to be a total pain due to its location. Shows up in both Raw and JPEG, camera is an istDS.

Thanks for the reply malcolmk. I've never had dust on my *istDS yet (touch wood), but found it hard to believe that this is how dust looks. Found Pentax's reply to follow their cleaning procecure in the manual (blow air onto mirror / CCD) an odd suggestion for fixing this.

Guess the camera has to go back. Pray it is returned before my holiday starts.

I've started to notice a green dot (actually more shaped like a +) in my pictures taken with *istDS. It's fairly in the middle of the pictures, and hence quite annoying. Advice from Pentax was simply to send camera back for inspection, and made it sound like dust. However, I thought dust would show up as black, not as bright green?

Here is a sample both at 1:1 and zoomed in:
http://slothy.co.uk/dot.jpg

Flink, thanks for those shots. I shot some trees against a white sky, and was very satisfied with the results (did not see any obvious purple fringing), so it looks like CA are (for me at least) certainly within acceptable limits.

Ken, my experiences with safaris have been mixed. On a number of private game reserves in south africa, the action was pretty close up, at least for those animals they dared go close to. Seeing a live lion at spitting distance is a scary experience. In the national parks (Kruger national park mainly) we didn't get anything like that, and we almost needed our binoculars. Of course seeing any animals is greatly influenced by luck, so other people are likely to have had a different experience.

Is your 170-500 lens used on a digital or film body? I agree that 200mm disappointed me with its reach, 320mm with a 1.5x crop factor is far better there.

I'm off to spray my roses now. I didn't even realise we had beasties until I saw the pictures myself!

I just took a quick snap in the garden, you can find it here. Pic has had no processing, just raw->jpg conversion using rawshooter.

Iso 200, f11, exposure of 1/180s, lens at 320mm.

Flink, yes if you have a patient family, primes can no doubt work. But when I'm on my safari I'm not getting out of that jeep for love nor money

Got the lens this morning, first impressions extremely positive. Nice quick focus, good reach, much sharper at the long end than I expected.

Of course primes are great, but 98% of my shots are "spontaneous" holiday or other event shots, where I can't really control that I can use manual zoom (ie walk to where is required) or can't quickly change lenses. To me zooms are very useful.

It also depends on what's available from the various manufacturers. The Sigma 18-125mm quite appeals to me as a very versatile walkabout lens, not seen anything from anyone else that would cover a similar range in a single lens.

Many thanks for your help John, I compared 200mm vs 300mm today and decided to go for the Pentax SMC 80-320mm. Getting it 2nd hand, and the silver won't match my black camera, but as long as the pictures turn out well I'll be a happy camper