Peter,
Here's my opinion on the same, after over a year's use:
The CF card slot on my camera was very tight to begin with. So tight that one had to have a long fingernail to flip the card out. However after ten ins and outs, or thereabouts, the cards slid smoothly in the track. With the camera tilted, it comes out by itself. This is not only due to wear on the card, since a brand new card I bought recently has been problem free from day one. One weakness with the CF compartment, though, is that the door is located very close to the camera strap. To me, this is a negative in the "nuisance" division, rather than "serious gripe" division.
The instant review without histogram is a beginner's gripe, imho. I remember I missed the feature for the first couple of hundred shots. However, by looking at the histogram after the image had been written to card, it's easy to learn what to expect from the camera's light meter. I think the last time I used the histogram was when shooting the Venus passage in June last year. Since then, the instant review has been off all together, which saves me a lot of battery.
The *istD is certainly the most precisely metering Pentax I have owned. The only situations I've experienced it to be off by more than 1/2 stop is once when I inadvertently had forgot to put it back to multi-segment metering after a session with spot-metering, and also in shots with sun in the frame. Shots with snow also become 1 stop underexposed in overcast weather, ie. low contrast. The predictable meter is another good reason why histograms on the instant review isn't a must-have, imo.
Btw, shooting RAW may have made me more laid-back on the exposure accuracy than I used to be with slide film. I'm still imagining that I work with a high-contrast slide film when I'm out there, and frequently I get surprises on how much more detail I'm able to lure out of the shadows and highlights with the RAW converter. This experience might be totally different for people used to colour negative or B/W, though, but I'm not able to tell...
hth, Jostein
----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Smekal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <pentax-discuss@pdml.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2005 12:30 PM
Subject: *istD-flaws
A Luminous Landscape review from 2003 maintains the following:
"Regrettably Pentax has missed the mark with the *ist D ... they can't
ignore ... two serious flaws < a highly problematic card compartment and
the lack of a histogram and highlight alert in post-exposure review mode
(only on subsequent image playback, but not right after taking the shot)
... The latter can probably be fixed with a firmware upgrade. The CF card
eject problem likely needs a body redesign"
Has Pentax fixed these problems in later-produced bodies or through firmware upgrades? Peter Sweden
