If you look at the mirror and the viewfinder relfection in it, it looks quite small for a fullframe. As you can compare with the K20D in the lower right corner, although the photo must be real though and that's a question of course.

Not new if you mean that with available.
You could special order the FA*600 f/4 but I believe they stop doing that.
The most modern Pentax covering 500mm is the FA* 250-600 f/5.6, Mighty expensive lens if you could find one secondhand.

The good news is that Pentax have a super tele-lens on the roadmap so maybe with some patience you might be lucky.

Indeed, have loads of fun with them ^^

The Bigma looks a bit more hazy then the DA*60-250 but that might also lights playing tricks. Both look very close and I don't think I would be able to tell wich lens shot wich photo.

Ah yes the delima of what to get.
The gitzo is mighty expensive, I only have a simple ballhead for my velbon monopod from them but it is quality though.

If you want carbon then £150 - £200 seems a bit too little.
Like I said I've my eyes on this one link the nice thing is you can transform the center colum from verical to horizontal in a second so that plus a ballhead would be nice for macro I believe. But then tripod + head you will end up around £300, you do get something for that money though ^^;
btw it seems strange but I believe that tripod gear is cheaper here, so your low pound don't do you much good.

Ther is also a Z-pro serie from cokin, you can reverse mount the filter holder so that you get a slim filter. The filters are also 100mm wide so filters from other systems also fit in it.

Z-pro is more expensive though but the filters are higher qualty then the P ones also.

or have standard a QR plate on your camera...

What a friendly forum once again

The upcoming DA*30 was announced to be similar in design as the DA*55 so who knows

To be honest, I don't see a real difference in time in photoshop, maybe that the 64bit version has something to do with that... I don't know really, maybe I never push it far enough to notice a difference

Yes I believe that 8bit is good enough, I mixed up somethings so 8-bit looks like it was really cutting it short with things.