Originally posted by Raylon I doubt they just activated memory, memory is memory, it's either there or it's not...seems like a silly idea to me. I think they just figured out a way in software to allow the buffer to hold more. It would only have been in Pentax's advantage to advertise a bigger buffer. They would have known if they had a bigger one. They wouldn't have just waited and been like 'Oh by the way we tricked you into thinking it wasn't going to shoot a lot of photos in continous mode...'
True. Memory is memory, but the software must know how much is there and be able to use it.
For example, if you have a computer that is running the 32 bit version of Windows (any version, XP, Vista or 7) on a motherboard with 8GB of RAM installed, Windows will only "see" and be able to use 4GB of it. The other 4GB will go unused, because a 32 bit address can only address 4GB of memory. That is the major difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the OS. Upgrade to a 64 bit OS and, Voila, the other 4 GB magically appears.
On a hard drive, you can create a partition that is less than the full capacity of the drive. For example, if I have a 500GB drive, I can create a partition that is only 100GB and leave the other 400GB unpartitioned, and unuseable. I just popped a 2GB SD card into my PC (32bit, Windows XP Pro) and opened Disk Management. I could not delete the partition, so I could not create a new partition. I suspect that this is because Windows does not write a partition table on flash memory cards, the way it does on a HDD.
I have done a fair amount of Assembler and machine-language programming in my day. Even on a sophisticated, general purpose operating system, such as Windows, Linux or z/OS (IBM mainframe), the programmer must program the amount of memory to be allocated for a given storage area. The OS in a camera is not all that sophisticated or general-purpose, and memory hardware usually doesn't change, so a programmer would not waste his/her time writing the program in such a way that it would examine its surroundings and allocate as much memory as is available. It could be done, but since you control both the software and the hardware environment in which it will run, and since the memory size usually doesn't change, you would be wasting your time and valuable memory for the instructions to do this.
So, as someone who has done this type of programming, I can very easily believe that it is at least possible that the software was developed with a target memory size, only to have that physical memory size changed in the hardware at the last minute. Making such a change to the software would not be difficult, but you would want to be very, very careful and do all sorts of regression testing before releasing the new software. Again, as someone who has been there, I can tell you that even for simple changes, the law of unintended consequences is in full force. A seemingly trivial change can cause unbelieveable havoc with a program, in totally unexpected ways, so nothing is ever taken for granted. You test, test again and then test some more.
I doubt if Pentax will ever release the real story behind this buffer upgrade, so we're left to speculations like this.