Serendipity and the Web

I’ve always appreciated the amount of useful information available on the web and have often been amazed at how that information is discovered. I started reading Tim Brays’s Ongoing blog a while back because of his take on Internet application development and technology. I was surprised to discover via one of his blog entries, that he also has a Pentax digital SLR (they are not that common).

His recent On Pentax posting was really interesting to me primarily because he linked to this review of new Pentax gadgets coming out. I’m not that interested in the new toys at the moment but it’s nice to see that Pentax is still in the digital SLR business. The really interesting thing for me was comment way down the page from Xebast Yan about split screen viewfinders for my model of Pentax camera.

The only thing I don’t like about my *istD is the viewfinder. It is clearly designed for auto focus lenses. I much prefer to focus myself, but the standard viewfinder makes that almost impossible and has led to lots of frustration on my part. Happening across that comment about Pentax cameras, pointed to by an Internet application/technology guy solved my dilemma nicely. I now have a split screen focusing screen from Katz Eye Optics that makes it as easy to focus my *istD as my ME Super Program (old film Pentax).

I hadn’t heard of Katz Eye before and I kept waiting for Pentax to offer a similar focusing screen — that was one benefit to the *istD: changable focusing screens. So Pentax lost the sale of focusing screen, but keeps me as a happy customer…