You can fix them yourself if you have all the parts.

Just put it all back together and hold the cover in place with a thumbnail while checking that the switch and button both work as they should. Next, lift the cover and put a tiny drop of superglue on the clip intended to hold it onto the lens barrel, then press it back into place. Use the smallest drop you can - you can always go back if it doesn't stick, but using too much risks gluing the lens solid or fogging elements/plastic trim as the glue hardens. Mine was repaired this way, seems to work perfectly and the repair is invisible.

Agreed (although I wish my local camera shops were full of cheap kit!)

A strident minority of ebay sellers seem to be forcing prices up with unrealistic buy it now listings. These convince other sellers that the market value of their items is higher and lead to such ridiculous items as an ME Super for £100. One particular seller who lists everything "best offer" but won't knock more than a couple of £s off is particularly to blame IMO, especially with their apparent monopoly on the supply of lens caps, etc...

I wouldn't be so sure about H+S killing it. The rest of Europe seems to adopt a far more sensible attitude about this, taking a line of "We've warned you of the risks, you decide whether to do it or not"!

There were (and are) Catalinas in flying order about. Somewhere amongst the family slide collection are a series of shots of one crash-landing in Plymouth harbour in the 1980s (Dad's first shots with his then-new Zeiss badged zoom). I've no idea whether it was repaired or indeed how the crew fared.

The maddening thing is the number of camera manufacturers who made something almost but not quite like a K-mount. Especially that weird Ricoh pin business!

I would imagine Pentax looked at the success of the M42 mount and hoped for similar results with the K mount. Sadly not many adopted it.

I know the original Lubitel 166 wasn't anything like that, it was a proper TLR (with the usual caveats about Soviet cameras).

I just find the whole lomography thing deeply bemusing, especially the prices. You can buy a very tidy and fully functional ME Super for less than most of these toy cameras, you'll get far better results too.

I bought a 166U new in the mid 1990s, cost me £30. I think that was about right, considered as a source of entertainment rather than a camera!

I'd imagine most of the primes are decent enough.

I have a Tokina AT-X 28-85mm which is a very nice piece of kit too, although more useful on MF film bodies.

Well that 135mm will be better than the f2.8 and f2.5. He's presumably comparing it with the Takumar Bayonet lenses which lack the full SMC coating, and therefore aren't really going to be that close...

Doesn't stop the chancers I see listing them for £50+ on ebay though, or the ones doing the same thing with the Pentax-A 28-80mm!

I cannot fathom how they think what was intended to be a cheap zoom in its day is worth more than the average price for an M 50/1.7, which will completely obliterate the zoom for image quality.

If it's anything like the other M series lenses then you should be able to fix it yourself without much trouble.

If you unscrew the finishing ring around the front element it will reveal some screw heads. If you then loosen these you should be able to adjust the infinity setting. You will need a tripod and something like an ME Super with split prism focus screen in order to set it correctly - I use the top of a hill about five miles away as a target as even with wide angle lenses it's easy to check that the two halves of the prism line up, the contrast between the green hillside and blue or grey sky is such. I've set up a few lenses this way now and all work well.

This is assuming that the lens is otherwise correctly assembled!