I dropped my *ist-D off for repair today at the local Pentax distributor. Yesterday I was taking photos at a wedding and all of them, except the first two, were underexposed by a couple of stops. I'd had this sort of trouble before when using flash and also a couple of weekends ago shooting race cars in bright sunlight and wasn't really sure whether it was a camera fault or not, but yesterday tipped the balance.
The repair guy didn't seem the least surprised when I explained the fault and was confident that it could be fixed so I'm assuming it is a known problem. He didn't even bother asking any questions - I just showed him the histograms on the display and explained that I was shooting on full auto and that was that. Unfortunately the camera is well out of warranty so I have no idea how much it will cost to fix. I'm hoping it is some sort of firmware reset and will cost nothing, but that is being fairly optimistic. Fortunately the wedding shots are salvageable, and in fact most of the time I was shooting B&W using an MX and 77LTD so the day was far from a disaster. For anyone who wonders whether the image size in the finder is really that important try swapping from a zoom on the *ist-D to a fast prime on an MX and back for a couple of hours and see if you change your mind. FWIW, when I had the problems using TTL flash I found that the AF400FTZ would screw most shots up while an AF280T using a more primitive TTL was fine. Regards, Paul Ewins Melbourne, Australia
