Ah Ok. Well I'm not going to stress about mine - I'll see how I get on with it. It's in fabulous condition anyway, I think I got a very fair deal on it (Cheers Tim!).

SDM ones? Which ones?

The 18-135 and 17-70 are the only SDM ones I've got.

Heavens, is that what:

... means?

I don't think I'd be up for that.

Quick shift is one thing, but grabbing the thing (no matter how gently) while it's actually rotating under power can't be good for it.

Analysing what I actually do when I point the camera, I notice that completely instinctively I aim the centre of the FOV at something thats reasonably high contrast for the half-press, and then recompose for the full press.

In fact the times that I want the thing it's focused on to be centre-frame are few and far between.

I'll be interested to see how it goes - my MF skills are all but atrophied these days.

Come on Mike, you know that you're being unreasonable... all you have to do is improve your technique to get round the alleged limitations of the gear.

Cracking rant. Straight talker, isn't he

I'm certainly starting to like it, but as luck would have it, I've just found a very repeatable situation where it fails to focus almost every time.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/IMGP0742-sm.jpg[/IMG]

At 70mm, it won't focus on the red spot, but it never misses on the green spot. If I manually focus on the red spot, sometimes it locks, but mostly it hunts.

At the wide end, it doesn't have any problem with either.

It's just one of those low contrast subjects that AF sometimes has trouble with, maybe. A little disappointing perhaps, that it can't see the cross between the tiles where the red spot is, but not worth getting too worried about, I suspect.

Does it do it often enough for you to get a sense of what pattern of use causes it?

I've just acquired one, and I'm starting to get used to its handling, though I haven't got anything decent to show for it yet. I've noticed it fail to lock once or twice, when the field of view has been very busy, and with the lens towards the short end.

Interestingly, it happened when I was first trying it out, and it hasn't happened since.

Of course, if you have the time to repeat the shot. This was always the case. On the K10D it's not a bit out, though, it's miles out, especially at small apertures.

On the K-5 it's not far from being spot on, which means that even with the old lenses, metering is quick and painless.

It's just nice that they've sorted it out, and good for them for taking the trouble. Especially in these days of auto-this, video-that, posh-SDM-lenses-for-close-to-a-grand the other...

... they've actually invested time and money in a feature that goes right back to the Pentax ethos of old. Given how many n00bs they'll have to sell the kit to (who will never understand the issue or be bothered about it being solved), to really get themselves back to centre stage, I think it's a fantastic gesture to the previous generation.

The more I think about it, the more extraordinary it seems. Credit to them, I say.

Well done for at least trying. I lost the will to live just thinking about doing it.

I did come across an alternate EXIF tool. As it stands, it's command-line only, but someone's written a UI for it.

AFAICS, there's no extra lens information, but it might be worth dropping Phil Harvey a line to see if there's a way of getting the more detailed lens id out.

Ok, so how do you extract it?

It's a bit disappointing that PhotoMe doesn't get the correct ID, even if it doesn't have the lens in its decode dataset.