andrea.gerosa

What about the AF? I read K100D will have a new better one with 11 points instead of 3. Is there much difference. I can stand to have only three points, but I need it to be fast and accurate. I'm leaving for holiday in a few days and need a serious digital camera. I would like to wait the K100D to be available in Italy, but I'm probably short of time. If there's not much difference, apart shake reduction, I could buy an *ist Dl, just to have it with me in my holiday. Otherwise I'll have to wait for K100D available after my travel, and go with my (quite good, I have to say) compact digital camera (Olympus C-60Z) and my glorious analogic Pentax MZ7.

I'm thinking about buying this camera and I have some questions:

Can it show an histogram preview before shooting?

Can it show an histogram soon after shooting?

Can I set it to always show them? (I use to do this with my current camera and wouldn't like to renounce to this facitlity

Is there any panorama facility? (this point is very important given the lack of the manual mode to keep esposition constant.

Thank you all for your advice!

So I think I'll buy just one standard lens, 18-55, 16-45 or 16-50, it depends on the prices I will find in Italy and then I'll use my old lenses as you suggested.

I don't want to spend much, so 18-55 could be good if you say it's not bad at all, unless I find 16-45 at a good price.

For the telelens, that I don't use so often I'll use the 28-80 long end and the 200 I already have. Of course my 200/4, although it's very old (early eighties) is better than any new cheap zoom like the one I could buy. I forgot to say my brother can lend me when I need a Pentax 28/2.8 M and a 50/1.7 M, very good low cost manual lenses, and even a 20/4 by Carl Zeiss with screw mount, with a very low distortion.

Once I had the 50 f/1.7 M with my Pentax MX. I was very happy with it. It should be very good value now.

Some years ago I bought my Pentax MZ7 with a Pentax standard zoom 28-80 f/3.5-

5.6, a cheap one but not bad at all. Now I'd like to go digital and buy a

Pentax *Ist Dl or next to come K100 with standard zoom 18-55 or maybe 16-45.

Can the 28-80 still be useful, considering that the only tele lens I have is

an old 200 f/4 with no "A" position, very good but also limited in the usa

with an AF DSLR? I don't know if it has a worthy number of lines per mm at the

telelens end (80mm that should be like a 120mm on APS-C)

Or should I consider buying a Pentax 50-200 a or a Tamron 70-300?

 

And what about 18-55 vs 16-45. The first is much cheaper, is the second worth

the difference in price?

This is my advice, I hope it can help.

Forget P mode at the moment. Try to shoot many times the same pictures with different aperture values, inside and outside. Try also to use manual focus, to look for maximum sharpness.

Then try to study the results to see if there is a relation between aperture and sharpness. You can read aperture from exif data. Please consider that ISO 400 gives less details than ISO 100. So if you have a tripod, use it to be sure there's no motion blur.

After that, if you still have problems, try to post some of your shots and let us see.

Andrè, I'm afraid you'll have to wait for a long time. According to rumours, Pentax is not even thinking about going to full format. Maybe they'll never do it.

Infact, Pentax is designing and producing a lot of good DA lenses, some of them are high quality, quite expensive lenses, and none of them will work with full format. Instead, they are soon going to medium format with a digital 645.

Resizing reduces sharpness, so it's better to sharpen after resizing. More, unsharp mask parameters tuning depends on size, another good reason to sharpen after resizing.

Frankly I don't know, but I hope chemical.

OK, Peter, Roger,

I can see your point, I can't simulate artificial light sources...

but moonlight? According to what you say I think I could, the distance of the light source is the same. The higher contrast could be due to the fact the sky reflects less moonlight than sunlight. By the way, I remember that some directors made it in movies with some particular filters and film.

I'll try to post some example if I succeeed

Is it ISO 3200 at full resolution (6MP)? Sounds interesting if it isn't bad noise over-reduction.

I have some pictures that I took during the day with some friends in

city streets, with normal light, in the shadow (not in the direct

sun light).

Now I want to make them like night pictures.

I thought to do as follows, after having obtained the correct levels

and white balance on the original image:

darken a little, rise the contrast and use filter 80a from photoshop.

Maybe the gamma may be lowered a litlle too.

Any suggstions?

I'm afraid Contax G2 lenses can't be mounted on any SLR, with or without adapter.

I had occasional problems with both PS CS and PSP 8, even reposting them, always with the same pictures. Usually I receive no error messagge and I am readdressed to the "manage my portfolio" page. Some of the pictures are resampled with Irfanview (the only program I have on my own computer). I can't understand what's wrong, I do apparently the same things to two different pictures and the result is that one goes and the other doesn't. More, files are named by my camera, always with the same structure.

Has anyone had the same experience?

F10 and F11 seem to be effective with their 1600 ISO. Pictures look so good! But, I ask at those who already use F10, do you think it's good noise reduction or a new sensor better at high ISO? Because I had some good result with my Olympus C60 at 400 ISO and Noiseware noise reduction software. By the way I obtained with it some decent results by manually exposing as if it had 800 or even 1600 ISO and then pushing the histogram on my PC. So if it's just noise reduction it's good to have it onboard (and much less work to do on the PC), but not good enough to leave my current camera which I bought only six months ago and has quite all the features of the new fuji but high ISO.

What do you think about it?

Regards

That's strange, it's so easy to understand that to reduce red eyes you must have black in place of red, and not grey, that I don't undestand how HP can miss it.

I usually select the area, desaturate and darken 40-50%, increasing contrast by 10-15%. It usually works better than automatic red-eye reduction. It seems not too difficult to automate that.

what about olympus camedia c70 zoom. I have c60 zoom and it's quite good, but has no raw. C70 zoom has raw and should be very good.

Leica announced they aren't going to develop a digital camera for their M-System. They say that M-lenses are not designed for didtal sensors due to the lifght rays coming from them wouldn't hit the sensor quite perpendicularly as requested. That could be the reason for that some M-lenses are reported to do some vignetting on the new Epson camera. No need to say that the same lenses perform excellently on Leica film cameras.

I've no news about that at the moment, but Panasonic top camera with stabilizer and fast lens could help to compensate low ISO CCD. Maybe something is coming from Fuji in the future, F10 has high ISO settings with their last sensor, but at the moment no high ISO.

If you're going to buy something that can't go in your shir-pocket anyway, what about an entry-level dSLR with standard zoom. Not so expensive and weighty versus a prosumer, and you don't have to swap lenses. No experience with DSLRs but I've been shooting for years with a SLR and never changed the standard zoom lens.

... and you can do it on any old style SLR Camera (without motor). Just before switching, put in slight tension the film by turning the knobble that you use to rewind the film.

Hi, Cokin has released a system of additional lenses (teleconverter

2X and wide-angle converter 0.5X)to be fixed with amagnet to the

front of the lens. To do that is provided a small adesive ring that

has to be attached permanently to the lens. Has anyone there used

this system? Do you think it can provide acceptable quality? Is

there any danger to damage the lens or the small motors for AF and

zoom lens with the weight of the additional lens?

best regards