The more I see of the "what camera should I buy" minefield, the more convinced I become that I bought the K10D for at best very naive, and at worst very suspect reasons. They boiled down to:

- I'd owned a Super A and ME Super for many years, and had enough Pentax-fit lenses to not really want to change system. (Even though since getting the K10D I've spent far more on lenses than I owned before.)

- My brother has a *ist D (which he still has as well as an LX) and has been very pleased with it

- I wanted more than 6 MP so I waited.

The only review I read (I think it was pretty much the only one at the time) was the notorious DPR one, in which I couldn't really see the alleged JPG softness they banged on about, and everything else about it was positive.

So since I'd been saving up for a long time, as soon as I found it in Jessops for £700 I got it.

That it would be Ok ergonomically I very much just assumed.

And with delicious irony, the only thing I checked in the store before making the final decision was that it worked with one of my M-series lenses.

I feel quite lucky, actually, and very relieved not to be going through the decision making process with all the information I have now.

Edit: in retrospect, of course, having been so pleased with the Super A and ME Super, and my brother's good experiences with the LX and *istD, can be seen as anything but coincidences, and hence actually quite good reasons for sticking with Pentax.

But I didn't know that at the time.

Well prices do vary a lot from store to store. I just happened to notice this ad.

I expect others will come in beneath that shortly. But compared with the USA, we do pay way over the odds.

It's hard to believe that it's actually a bad camera, but for 1100 quid from Jacobs I have to say that the spec is a big yawn.

Why would its flash sync speed be slower with SR on than off?

That's good news then... I might make my brother an offer for his - he never uses it.

Well I paid about £100 for an SMC-A 100mm F4 macro. So I'd have to guess quite a bit more than that.

Actually I do have one after all..

It does look a bit odd, doesn't it. But it's not something I've done to it. Deeper sea? Edge of faint cloud allowing bluer light to be reflected?

I don't know, but it doesn't look as strange on this 100% crop of the original - just deeper sea is my guess:

I noticed that, but it's not the result of the correction. The only thing I did to the horizon was correct the distortion evident in the first version, which is unmodified except for reducing to 800px wide and the same amount of USM as in the brighter version.

Only a really bad one taken from the same helicopter flight.

It is. Pretty much everywhere you look is just lovely.

Well here they all are. The two at bottom left aren't included in the twelve, as I understand it. I can see nine, including the two collapsed stacks behind the first big one, with possibly a tenth one in the distance just before the first headland (not the really big one just before the horizon).

Well my sky was bluer than yours, and there was more sun about. From memory 'reality' was something between my two, so I'll probably redo it at some point.

I was really ruminating about whether, for something small such as an 800px web display, a little more than you'd do for a big print is legitimate, since the small size kills so much of the impact anyway.

I used to like Konica film for 6x4 prints since it tended to overdo the greens a bit, for the same reason.