Originally posted by az1895 I need help BAD ! Im no noob to film , but this late bloomer is overwhelmed by about 350 pages of K5IIs mass confusion !
I transitioned from MX to K100DS in late 2007.
I sympathize with your feeling about the manual. The manual for the K100DS is so badly written that I could not find out how to use the cobination of buttons to use a K mount lens.
This made me think about the problem of the manual and compare manuals for old cameras with new. (butkus site is great for this!)
What I discovered was that all the pre-digital manuals were written using what the modern software engineers call 'use case' type approach (expressed in human language). Essentially - 'you want to do this with the camera' THEN ''operate these controls in this way and have the settings like so". The MX manual was written this way.
All the digital camera manuals have copied the style from the (almost monopoly software maker's help menus - the judge said they had a monopoly so they must) and give a reference manual for what each control or menu item does. They then leave it to the user to integrate all the bits into ways to do things users want to do. The problem with this is that if you do not know the magic word the maker named an action with you will never find out that a particular action can be done or how to do it.
Since there is so much sw in a camera the design of the interface was done using usecases. The manual writers should take the use cases and translate them into normal people's language and print the book.
BTW: the famous software maker's help menus are pretty useless except for use strictly as a 'reference' to things you already know about. The help menu tells you useless stuff if you click 'help->about' - but it does not tell you the maker's description of what the package is for. And tell me where logical page 1 is so I can start at logical page 1 and at the bottom click on 'next' and when I have read about all the things I think I want to do with the product I stop. Then I could give the package to my grandma and say 'find out for yourself', and many of grandma's misconceptions and belief that computing is arcane would go away.
Sad to say, the only feature of my vey nice car I dislike intensely is the manual. I could not even find a simple direct statement of what octane rating of petrol I should use. I had to go to the advertising brochure which I still had.