I use a Slik AF2100.

It was £50 when I bought it (nearly double that now, but I bet it's still worth every penny), some 20 years ago, and it's just as good as it ever was. It's never off the tripod, except when it's on the monopod.

It's fab - convenient, and strong - it'll support the tripod (collapsed) held horizontal without the ball slipping.

It also has a very convenient quick release plate:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/IMGP9502-smsh.jpg[/IMG]

You unlock 'B', press the button 'A', unlatch and rotate - and the camera comes straight off. Reverse to lock.

You do have to make sure it's latched though. I didn't, once, but fortunately caught the camera as it fell. Never made that mistake again.

Very much so. As it happens, this shot is one of my favourites from those days, and there's a 20x30 print from it on one of my walls.

There's no significant grain in the print at all, but here's a 100% crop of the scan - the tree at centre background in the above picture. It's unedited, just reduced from 16 bit TIFF to 8 bits, and saved as max quality JPEG.

The film was Konica, 100 ASA.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Technical/140-000b-crop.jpg[/IMG]

Also, for this frame only, I did the very slow 16x superfine scan, that scans each bit 16 times to average out any noise. So I'm guessing that really is the grain, or whatever the equivalent of grain is, for colour film.

This was taken in Richmond Park one very cold morning early in 1989.

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/140-000b-nr-smsh.jpg[/IMG]

Have I lifted the shadow detail too much, do you think?

I use the following manual lenses on the K10D:

SMC A 50mm 1.7
SMC A 100mm F4 macro
SMC A 400mm F5.6

The viewfinder focus confirmation is the only aid I use.

To get images off my cards, I use the downloader that came with Elements 5, and have it create a folder with the download date (not the shot date) in the name, as a sub-folder of 'My Pictures'.

Then I tell Picasa 3 (now 3.5) to monitor the 'My Pictures' folder and everything underneath it, and that's all I do. You can create subfolders, move pictures around, and it keeps track of them all virtually in real time.

I think it's excellent, and so fast that I can scroll through the library faster than I could type in any text tags to search on.

I reckon you'd do better to eBay this lot. The vast majority of the people here, I'd guess, already have as many manual focus Pentax cameras as they want.

I got £15 for a Program A body last year on eBay - it went to someone who was running photographic courses for a local adult college.

If you really want to get rid of pre-digital gear, the market for it is only going to get worse, except for true museum pieces, and you'll be waiting a long time for ME Supers to be in that short supply.

I'm not sure why... there's nothing exceptionally bright, nor exceptionally dark, so it looks about right to me. It would look a bit better with a bit more contrast, perhaps.

Could your monitor be a bit on the bright side?

For comparison, here's the histogram from the second one above - the one with the tree and the sheep in the field:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/134-000-Histogram.jpg[/IMG]

Yes, there are all sorts of things you can adjust, including the exposure of the scan; red, green and blue independently if you want.

This is the histogram from the uploaded JPG:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/134-001-Histogram.jpg[/IMG]

Not sure what, if anything, it proves, though.

Hmm. Good question.

How can I tell?

To celebrate the first 400 frames scanned, I've started a thread with a few pictures - I'm pleased to find that there are a few half-decent ones in amongst the dross.

Now that I'm using the older, slower PC to run the scanner software, it's become completely stress-free.

Not a single scan error since switching, and there's nothing to do except feed a strip in, choose some saved settings, and press the 'go' button.

Reliably 7 minutes, plus or minus a few seconds, per strip of four negs.