Guessing you mean in a 52mm and 58mm thread?

You won't be wasting your money with a couple of polarising filters, they're handy for cutting down reflections from water, polished paintwork, glass, etc. Of the handful of filters I've bought the polarisers have seen the most use.

Neutral Density or ND filters (and the related graduated grey) are a bit more specialised, they're used to take long exposures in order to get effects such as completely flat water and dramatic clouds amongst other things.

The K-m will work perfectly with the same settings - I tend to let mine roam between 100-800 ISO in Program or Av, or dial it in manually in M mode.

I have never noticed the lack of indicated focus points, mind you I pretty much went straight from a P30T to mine so you never miss what you didn't have!

I'm finding that the LBA is slowing down as I've got most of the glass I want now. I wouldn't mind a 28-50mm, 35mm, 100mm, or any K series lenses but I've got most of the common ones worth owning.

That'd be me

The K 28mm f3.5 must be a downright incredible lens, considering that it seems to be held in higher regard than the M version. I have the M and it tends to live on the camera for general photography - if I'm going out and only taking one lens it's that one. It has excellent depth of field and infinity comes up very quickly, as well as being very sharp and with next to no distortion. I use a stitching program named "Hugin" if I want to get the effect of a wider angle lens, with that and a manual lens it's an absolute doddle to get decent panoramic shots with the field of view of a fisheye lens but none of the distortion.

Bear in mind that you can't use the DA lenses on your ME anyway as they don't have an aperture ring. IIRC some of them do have full frame coverage but aren't listed as such - the 40mm f2.8 LTD is one.

My only DA lens is the kit 18-55mm, since then I've always bought used film-era lenses simply because the quality is just as high and they're a good deal cheaper.

Yep, but these are brand new boxed lenses!

I have thought about buying one, but given that I have 50mm and 200mm primes along with a 28-80mm and 100-300mm I think that range is pretty well covered...

Sensor cleaning - on those occasions when the built in sensor shaker hasn't done the trick I've used a Giottos "Rocket Blower" puffer bulb. Make sure the tip of the nozzle doesn't touch the sensor and give it a good blow.

If that doesn't work I have heard good things about the Arctic Butterfly cleaning brush, and also heard of people using top quality extra-soft artists brushes after thoroughly cleaning them to remove any contaminants.

There seem to be a lot of the DA 50-200mm zooms about at low prices at the moment - presumably these are either split from kits or discounted due to slow sales?

Don't think they'd like my K 120mm f2.8 then, works on any Pentax ever made!

Is there really no money for them in at least trying to avoid being a laughing stock amongst photographers? It surely wouldn't be that hard to appoint one or two people who actually know their stuff in every store and then expect the others to pick things up from them, result being that you'd have a shop where they know a fair bit but also know who to ask if the customer comes up with something they've never encountered before.

I tend to use Amazon or Ebay depending on which is cheaper. There are often some good deals from Amazon Marketplace sellers, and Amazon will sort it out if they fail to deliver or attempt to fob you off with a lesser product (which has yet to happen to me).