The silver FA 28-80mm was my first AF lens after the kit one as I saw it for £25 and thought it worth a go. It isn't at all bad although it's not as sharp or as fast as the manual primes I've bought since.

You won't find anything wider than 18mm cheaply, although SRS had the 16-45mm F4 for £225 or so last time I checked.

If you want something small and unobtrusive for urban shooting then have a look at the new DA 35mm f2.4, which is a superb first prime at around the £150 mark.

If the budget won't stretch that far then look for the old SMC Pentax or SMC Pentax-M 28mm f3.5. You should be able to find the latter for around £50 with a bit of searching and it's a brilliant little lens with almost no distortion, allowing you to use image stitching software and assemble larger images like a jigsaw.

I'm not so sure about a possible price drop - didn't someone recently find an interview with a Hoya bigwig who said they wanted to keep prices high and make Pentax a premium brand (daft idea, but it's their company)?

I know what will happen however:

15th January Pentax cashback offer ends

Early March: I buy K-r, assuming prices don't go up

A few months later: Price drops by £50!

First off, check the trigger voltage on the flash. If it's higher than about 8v then don't risk connecting it directly.

You can buy slave flash units (which usually double as a hotshoe for mounting them to a tripod or bracket) for about £5 on ebay, might be the easiest way.

To be fair, if you look at their golden age of mechanical cameras they usually only had two or three models. You'd have the basic one (KM), pro spec one (KX) and top of the range one (K2), then it became the MX and ME, and so on. It's a lot less confusing for customers and presumably makes their service centres much easier to look after, as they only need to train repairers on two models at a time.

It does now have the motor winder. That cost me a whole ten pounds!

K-xs are currently hovering around £300, probably the best value Pentax DSLR to give that lens a go with. See if you can find one in a colour to match it...

That's why I suggested using the £5 remote rather than a genuine one. Much easier!

I dunno, it did come with a free mould colony inside the lens which I was forced to remove!

To be fair, this is little different to the prices you'd see if someone offered Van Gogh's paintbrushes for sale (with proof of the provenance). People will always pay over the odds for anything associated with a famous individual.

I'm happy with my pair of black cameras: ME Super with 40mm f2.8 and MV1 with 50mm f2. Given the latter cost me £10 and can probably produce as good a photo as the Leica I see it as something of a bargain!

How hard would it be to combine a variable timer unit (which simply closes a pair of contacts at the selected intervals) with one of those £5 infra-red remotes? That'd give you a device which would work on all Pentax DSLRs.