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. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.