I've a blu-ray burner here, still waiting till the prices of the discs comes down a bit further

A external harddisk is the best option I believe the prices arent that high and if stored probable last a life time.

There are also some sites where you can store your photos online.

I see them though, so the problem probable is with you Terry.

The bee looks very sharp and the angle of the flower works really well.
It might help if you putt a space between both photos and we have a photo section BTW

SRS is a thrusted suplier to many of the forum members so if you say you're on the pentax forum they might gice you a special deal.
I'm also tempted with doing business with them

a prime lens might also be a solution, you can get the 50mm 1.4 very cheaply these days, surely if you don't mind manual focus.
The f/1.4 allows more light to come through so you don't need to up the iso as much.

There isn't really a solution for the focus, the only thing I can come up with is the AF assist beam that are in some flashguns. They shine a red grid on the subject and the camera focus very fast and accurate then.

A flashgun is of course also a solution to have better light for your lens, if you bounce the light on the ceiling it looks quite natural.

Yes maybe a bit, it comes from the well used kit lenses from other companies, most of them also have a plastic mount and they wear over time.
Also when two materials are forced against each other the weaker one lose material. With plastic vs metal, plastic will lose material, it's as simple as that.
The couple of year bit should be taken in a broad sence.
Hopefully Pentax proves me wrong though but we will see.

Still 25 gram against the lost of some handy features doesn't seem worth it in too my eyes but that's for everyone personal.

I believe you mean this Shim link

I don't really know what I need to picture myself with that but it's pattern noise so far as I know.

In which image and where do you see it?

Why did they even bring out the DAL version, the diffrence in weigth isn't that much and most users would miss the things they have taken out

Oh that one looks nice Mark, I would be proud of a photo like that.

The pixel peeping is hardly a good way to look at your photo, if you set your view at 50% you get a much better idea how it will look like when it is printed and you always resize it for the web.

With the workflow I've now it takes 30, 40 seconds or so to get from unthouched raw to a finished photo. Atleast if the exposure and everything was good and I only need to do my basic things.

Here is an artical about the DAL serie link

Mike,

with 100% cropped is meant cropped at 100% view, so one pixel from the camera is one pixel of the photo you see.
the problem is that the naming isn't correct if you crop something for 50% you of course take away 50% from it so if you do a 100% crop you wouldn't have an image

The shots are opened and converted to DNG in lightroom it aplies 25% sharpening from his own I believe, the DNG goes straight from lightroom to Photoshop and only there it's converted to JPG.
It's on photozine... here it is Sharpen'o'Matic

Raw always needs sharpening since the information isn't worked at like it is with JPG, so you need to develop the information
The little sharpening from adobe camera raw is hardly noticable.
The nice thing is from matt's sharpening is that the highlights lights up it gives the photo more punch.

Your photos are also very sharp, is the last one really at 1:1 pixel ratio?