This may show the original source of your lens (link to scans of the 1985 Argos catalogue!)

I'd also argue with anything saying £2k worth of kit is the "best buy"!

I'd be slightly more impressed with an article explaining that you can get decent shots with cheaper kit and how to get the best results from what you have.

I never knew that!

I know a couple of plumbers who won't use them but I always put it down to copper joints being cheaper and unlikely to develop a leak later on, plus it's easy to work with assuming you can solder.

Yep, but given it was a Lada you could probably fix it with a hammer and a roll of wire...

You can still buy a new Lada Niva, someone is importing LHD ones for about £9k. I'd probably buy one if I had the money to hand, compared to the competition it's a bit of a bargain.

The chrome can deteriorate - I know I have one which has bubbled and corroded around the edge. It doesn't make any difference to the camera as the surface which touches the lens is unaffected (so the lens isn't pushed away from the mount) but it doesn't look very good close up.

Sounds like Mercedes and Saab have some similarities...

Dad has a 2006 9-3 TiD which decided to have a long-term electronic strop a couple of years ago. Basically it would decide that traction control was faulty then disable the accelerator and fix itself at 1500 rpm. Presumably this is for Americans who can't drive but have lawyers, as personally I'd have designed it to flash up "TCS Failure: Consult Dealer" and carry on normally without it, which would be a lot safer too.

Ended up spending about a month at the dealer being completely rewired due to a few pence worth of corroded wire!

What really gets to me on that site is the attitude amongst some of "ask permission".

If something is visible from a public right of way then you do not need permission to photograph it. Asking permission just gives security goons the idea that they have power. Don't ask. Just shoot and move on.

The creeping privatisation of our country worries me. If landowners are going to get aggressive about photography on a publicly accessible open-air area (thinking walkways around the outside of shopping centres) then they should be legally required to erect a warning sign everywhere their land meets a public right of way explaining this.

Yes it can...but as John says does it really bother you?

Spares or repair MX bodies don't tend to go cheap enough that you'd buy one just for the mount.

They are very simple to use, you can find a manual as a free PDF online.

Consider looking for an SMC Pentax-M 28mm f3.5 to complete the set, they take up next to no space and are very sharp indeed.

What do you mean by leather holder by the way - is it the ever ready case (back half stays wrapped around camera body, front half unclips to reveal the lens when you want to use it) or a camera bag? If the former then it's quite hard to find, if the latter then it sounds suspiciously similar to one I had with an MX, flash and light meter a couple of months ago.

All of the B&W shots I've posted to the gallery here were shot on HP5 with various cameras, as was this album of a test roll from an old MV1 and 50/2

Exif data is from the scanner (one of those Ion Film 2 SD ones available pretty much everywhere).

I have seen the exact same problem on a K7. It was definitely the wheel as if you went into the menus and swapped the function of the two wheels over then the shutter speed would click up or down smoothly. Set as normally expected it would jump all over the place rather than moving in the usual increments.

Repaired under guarantee, thankfully!

I recently came across a suspiciously familiar-looking lens by a company named Phenix. The optical formula/focal length/aperture combination suggests a sort-of copy of the Pentax-M lens, although it takes 52mm filters as opposed to the 49mm of the Pentax.