[stormtech]

Fotodiox (or whatever) adapter seems well made. It's solid metal, and the inside is painted black already. It's perhaps not as flat as it could be, but it's not silver or anything, which is what I expected after I read about people painting theirs.

The only issue i have with it is that the Q-mount is a little loose. The camera can move ever so slightly on the end of the adapter. That's a little annoying, but it doesn't seem to effect anything. Is there a way to tighten it up?

Charles.

Must be quite a bit of difference in the tolerance of the Fotodiox adapter. Mine is tight - I mean really tight on both ends. On the lens end, I kind of cringed a bit when attaching my 100 WR macro lens because of the seal is really tight.

As far as the camera end, as long as it locks in position as it should I don't see it being much of a problem.

If the Pentax adapter wasn't quite so expensive...........I will have to see how much I am actually going to use it come this spring/summer.

LBA - CBA - GBA......when does it ever end???

[crewl1]

Fotodiox (or whatever) adapter seems well made. It's solid metal, and the inside is painted black already. It's perhaps not as flat as it could be, but it's not silver or anything, which is what I expected after I read about people painting theirs.

The suggestion was made because it was found that some lenses seemed susceptible to internal reflections and flat black paint improved contrast and eliminated haziness on the Q.
In my case, painting it did not make a difference with the DA*300, but it made a huge difference with the Sigma 70-200.
If you don't paint it, YMMV.

[ChopperCharles]

Hrm, the 50mm f1.7 seems a little hazy... so, I should paint over the somewhat shiny black on the inside with complete flat black? I can mask the adapter off and spray paint it tomorrow.

So far, I slapped my 55-300 on the adapter, and shot the moon tonight. It's not a particularly good night. Moon was a little low in the sky, and there were clouds moving across it, which left a big glow in the sky even when the clouds weren't directly in front of the moon. These are the conditions I usually avoid, because I end up with shitty, blurry moon shots.

Left my remote trigger, so I ramped up the ISO a little and used a 2-second timer. So far, the moon pictures I took tonight with the Q, in the worst conditions possible, are better than all of my best-conditions moon shots. 55-300 was VERY sharp... and WTF -- I considered my 500mm mirror pretty much useless for shooting the moon, and it actually returned some pretty decent results. I'm not sure if the 55-300 or the 500 will have more detail when all is said and done. I'm impressed. I can't wait for a clear cold sky with the moon high in the heavens to really give these two lenses a workout.

Charles.

[ChopperCharles]

Why can't I do an exposure more than 2 seconds with an adapted lens?

Charles.

[snostorm]

Hi Charles,

Apparently that's a 3rd party adapter limitation. That's what I get with my RJ K2Q and Kipon C2Q, but with the Pentax K2Q, I can get up to 30 sec and also "B". It looks like it has something to do with the leaf shutter since the FE has contacts on the lens, but no shutter in the lens -- and it is limited to 2 sec also -- so it's probably not a chip in the lens.

Scott

Just confirmed this in the manual. Having a leaf shutter is the difference.

[crewl1]

So now a third reason to get the official adapter.
1)Flash to 1/250 or 1/1000, 2)no jello effect, 3)long exposures up to 30 sec

[ChopperCharles]

Why would the leaf shutter matter one iota? That seems like a purposeful software limitation by Pentax, and not an actual, honest limitation of the camera system.

Charles.

[snostorm]

Why would the leaf shutter matter one iota? That seems like a purposeful software limitation by Pentax, and not an actual, honest limitation of the camera system.

.

Hi Charles,

Could be -- No mfg designs their products to necessarily fully support easily designed and manufactured third party accessories. There would be no real justification for consumers to buy OEM items. Granted, this would be somewhat contrary to Pentax's historical direction -- almost complete backward lens compatibility in all of their DSLRs has cost them millions in lens sales. . .

.. . But it also could be for an actual justifiable reason -- what if they wanted to allow other adapters to perform to a usable point, but prevent the accidental exposure of a charged (exposing) sensor for longer than 2 seconds without a lens mounted to protect it. A sensor that's exposing could continuously build a charge, attracting more debris, and would also be heating up -- possibly baking the debris on the sensor.

I don't know -- and I'm not suggesting that this is the reason, just posing one possibility that just came to me without a whole lot of thought.

If you need longer exposures, you can probably do it with Multiple Exposure Mode with or without Ev comp -- that should get you about 18 seconds, and you could possibly stack exposures to get multiples of that.

Scott

[drougge]

I'm pretty sure it's at least officially for noise control. The leaf shutter allows the sensor to be read out in darkness, which might allow for a less noisy method, or something.

That said, I've stacked these shutterless 2s exposures with pretty good results, and I doubt it'd be worse to let it expose longer, so I think they could allow longer exposures. They could even have limited it to lenses with contacts if they worry about the sensor. (Not that anything stops you from having just the Q-K adapter and no lens.)