On the last day at Svalbard I joined a snowmobile hike to the East coast of Spitsbergen, a 10 hour ride. I carried the 645D in a holsterbag (a LowePro Toploader) on my chest. The temperature in Longyearbyen when we started was -25 °C. I could swear it was colder on the glacier.
In short, the camera performed flawlessly. Exposures turned out correct, the AF was snappy and accurate, processing and storing to memory card worked at normal speeds and without glitch. All buttons operated as they should. There were some gotchas, though, but hardly the camera's fault. 1. The LCD on top of the camera got veeeery sluggish. When changing shutter speed with the control wheel, for example, it took about five seconds to switch the displayed number. 2. All of the manual focus 645 lenses and many of the FA lenses are constructed in the same way as are the A-series for K-bayonet. That is, with a lot of metal. This means one has to be careful about handling the lenses with bare skin. Any amount of moisture will freeze on touch. 3. The glass on rear display also gets very cold. My nose stuck to it twice. The skin is still sore, two days later. 4. Battery performance goes down. Mine was fully charged in the morning. By lunch I had made about 100 exposures, and the indicator showed 67% charge. Some time in the afternoon I tried to do a series on passing snowmobiles. The indicator dropped to empty after five shots, but all images were stored correctly. I tried again with eight exposures twenty minutes later, and everything still got stored properly. The indicator would go back to 67% after a couple of minutes' rest in the holsterbag. Oh, and _don't_ breathe out with the camera before your face! :-) -- http://www.alunfoto.no/galleri/ http://alunfoto.blogspot.com -- 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.