And what an extraordinary first post, after four years of membership.

I bought a Vodafone one. £40 for the doohickey, and that includes the first 1Gb of data. £15 per Gb top-up thereafter. I'm down to about £7 remaining on the initial one after several months of occasional use.

The only other PAYG one (T-mobile IIRC) was £2 on any day you use it at all, and then unlimited on that day.

What attracted me to the Vodaphone one was that there's no expiry of the data transfer you buy. This means that you don't end up wasting £2 on the days you try and log on, and discover that the connection is rubbish, but you've paid your £2 because you used three bytes getting connected at an unusable speed.

My experience so far is that 3G+ (the fastest) is very rare, 3G (slower) is more common, and on the train, it often drops out completely through the tunnels, or almost as bad, degrades to GPRS which is slowwwwwwww, and makes you wish there was an option to switch off forum images.

I bought mine in a Vodafone shop, but you can get them online too.

Remember to switch off Windows' auto-updates when you're on the road. Else you unusually get a fantastic connection, and your data transfer is all gone on a few security updates you didn't need quite that urgently.

I could live with the lack of crispness on its own, although of course it would be better sharper.

But the red at the front of the hat, and on the brim, looks rather burned out to me, so the detail is lost, and the colour in the burned out area, although striking, looks a bit artificial.

For me, that tips it over into the "not quite" category.

The risk of giving offence seems to be a significant problem for some when it comes to views on some subjects in these parts.

I think therefore, that a little more consideration would be better, when it comes to how views are expressed concerning what is, and is not Ok, in the breast department.

I'm not at all disagreeing with you - I'm just questioning how easy to use it would be as a portrait lens when wide open, or nearly so. If the subject's face was square to the camera, you'd be able to get both eyes in focus, for instance, but at an angle you quite likely wouldn't.

That first photo in the series at F1.2 is a good example of what I mean - the flower square on to the camera is Ok - pleasantly soft, but the one at an angle isn't really in focus at all other than the closest part of it. In a portrait this would present difficulties.

Pleasant though bokeh often is in a photographic image, one thing it definitely isn't, is true to life.

When you look at something with your eyes, you see it as sharp as your eyes can focus, and when you're looking at something, it's very hard to be aware of the out of focus areas of the field in any kind of detail.

So whatever 'true to life' bokeh is, I'd be surprised if anyone can be aware enough of it in detail sufficient to compare with photographic bokeh.

_
(Edit: or did you mean 'true to life' as 'produced by a real lens'? Sorry if I've misunderstood.)

Undoubtedly, and not just women! But as I said before, the wafer thin DOF at the very wide apertures will have other effects. Is the softness in a portrait from the F1.2 going to differ that much from just defocusing a sharper lens a little?

For a short zoom that's going to be on the camera a lot, I don't think 24mm is wide enough, let alone 28.

Is this really practical though? For portraits with a 50mm lens, you're going to be quite close. And at apertures large enough to get the dreamy softness, you're going to have a wafer thin depth of field.


I don't think this makes you a Luddite, it's just a preference. Perfectly reasonable IMO.

I'm somewhere in the middle - I can't paint, and I like the dreamy effect in certain circumstances. But not enough to justify buying an A1.2, except as an investment perhaps, and once owned as such, an occasional curiosity.

On this specific point, suppose what we'd seen originally had been a somewhat more thorough version of this.

I don't think I could have put my hand on my heart and said what I said before.

Zoikes... how did that happen?

Perhaps you need the new K10D firmware until you can get it replaced