Brian, Thanks for letting us know about your new Optio. You should certainly see a lot better battery-life with the Ni-Mh cells.

Hi Brian,

I've used the Optio 330 (younger brother of the Optio 430), and found it to be a well featured ultra compact. Image quality although not brilliant is good for a camera of its size and price range.

As far as I am aware the Optio 430 improves slightly on the 330 by having a higher resolution CCD. This means you can print your images slightly larger without losing detail.

If you're looking for a digital camera that performs as well as your SLR then you're likely to be dissapointed by the Optio. However if you are looking for an ultra compact digital which offers more features than most other compacts available the Optio is a great choice.

Hi John,
Pentax did have a digital SLR planned, but unfortunately development was cancelled due to high costs.

With all the other manufacturers having Digital SLRs out, or planning them it seems unlikely Pentax would miss out on this part of the market for much longer.

The problem is all the manufacturers keep their cards close to their chest so we're unlikely to know anything about any digital SLR from Pentax until a month or so before its release.

Hi Stephen,

I suspect your lens requires a 67mm lens hood. Pentax do have two 67mm round metal lens hoods on their pricelist. We have put the list on this web site for everyones convenience and the relevant link is:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/pages/pricelist/pl_mfacc.htm

However unfortunately neither mention being compatible with your particular lens.

Have you tried ringing Pentax? Sorry I can't be of more help.

Kind regards,

Will Smith

(Edited by Will at 3:18 pm on Jan. 10, 2002)

Hi Ian, There's some info here which should be of use:
K 50mm f/1.2

Hi everyone,

I've just added over 20 photos to the web-site gallery.

Will

Stephen,

It's no problem to have a forum area of this site dedicated to specific local groups. I think we could also host pages for local groups but these would need to be set up by someone from each group.

I've just set one up. We're aiming to get more people to visit this web-site soon, hopefully things will pick up then.

Hi everyone,

I'm Technical Assistant here at Pentax User magazine and I adminster these forums. We've had a few people mention that the forum registration process was complicated so I've added a little note explaining that you don't need any of your subscripition or membership information to use this forum.

Can anyone else suggest how else we could improve these forums? I realise there's only a few of us using this at the moment, but these things do take time to build up.

Please don't hesitate to suggest anything you'd like to see added here or on the web-site.

Hi Kwen, glad you like the forum. I'm suprised you're finding it slow, are you in the UK? I'm also on ADSL and haven't had any problems with speed.