Unfortunately neither Larry nor I won the K-7 they gave away :-(
But they did bring a whole load of nice tempting toys to play with:
http://www.jfwaf.com/temp/RoadShow1.jpg
Apart from several working K-7s (and a cutaway model, and a model
with a transparent body shell) and a Star Wars K2000, they also
had pretty much all the DA* lenses, and a good selection of the
DA Limiteds. I got to try out the DA* 200, 300, 60-250 and 55, and
the DA 15 (which looks *tiny* when you put it alongside the 14).
(The above shot, of course, is taken with the 10-17mm fisheye @17mm.
That's fairly obvious. Not quite so obvious, perhaps, is that it was
taken at ISO 3200 using one of the K-7s; I took along my own SD card.
It would be even better if I'd dialed in 2/3 of a stop more exposure).
Long-time PDML members might recall the name of Mark Dimalanta - he
was active on the list something like twelve years ago. He was the
primary presenter at the event.
http://www.jfwaf.com/temp/RoadShow2.jpg
That's Mark on the left, explaining something to Larry. This was a
shot taken with the DA 15mm - a lens I could easily grow to love.
And here's a shot of the K-7 in see-through clothing:
http://www.jfwaf.com/temp/RoadShow3.jpg
That's taken with something at 55mm - probably the DA* 55 (which
didn't seem that slow to focus to me). Unfortunately I can't tell
exactly what lens it was - I haven't upgraded the version of Adobe
Lightroom that I'm using on this machine, so it doesn't understand
the Pentax-private data in the K-7 files (which includes lens ID).
It's just as well I'm getting a new laptop computer; opening three
K-7 files at the same time on this machine, which only has 1GB RAM,
just about brought the system to its knees. I'll upgrade to the
new version of Lightroom when I've got the new machine.
One of the other Pentax folks there was taking notes about points
raised by attendees (Mark had already stressed the responsiveness
of Pentax - he too had not liked the original way that the 4-way
controller worked when selecting focus points during a shoot). I
mentioned the lack of a calibration capability for the built-in
level, so this will probably get back to the folks at Pentax.
P.S. I did, of course, wear one of my PDML T-shirts.
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