I've seen it on Kodachrome too, so I suspect it has more to do with storage than brand. My Dad has slides dating from 1978 through to the 1990s covering his postgrad student days through into the best part of twenty years of family holidays, unfortunately when I went through them recently looking for anything worth scanning I found mould on quite a few of the oldest. I was able to remove most of the marks with cotton buds and computer monitor cleaner but it was impossible to get right into the corners and I was worried about doing more harm than good if I rubbed any harder.

The ones of the immediate aftermath of dropping his K2 down Pen y Fan are still ok, as is the camera (will be taking it out for some exercise this summer)!

The only lenses I've ever felt the urge to sell have turned out to be ones that nobody else wants to buy!

Interesting to see that primes seem to be higher in the wish-I-hadn't-sold stakes than zooms, especially that M 100mm f2.8 which I really must track down a sanely priced example of.

I've had a few like that:

Black K2 in minty condition but listed as "spares/repair", went for about £15 after I forgot to put a bid in. It would easily have been worth the price of a professional CLA to get it working properly. I strongly suspected that it just needed new batteries and some attention to the film speed selector.

Missed a winder for a KX or KM motor by a few quid - I don't have the modified camera though, so not a great loss!

It's definitely worth the time, assuming you got it cheaply enough. I will say though that AF zooms are seriously complicated - I've only managed to repair one so far and that was (thankfully) a simple matter of unscrewing the front element and cleaning the inside surface of it. I did have a 28-70mm in bits a while ago (suffering from the element glue failure problem, so not repairable) and only just managed to get it back together!

Reasons why I shouldn't go on ebay in the middle of the night - I now have an MZ-7 on the way (£14 and listed as good working order)! Should be able to fully use my DA 35mm as well as all my other lenses, about the only things in my collection which won't work are the DA zooms.

There's only one snag with the Subaru so far - the standard tyres are like driving on blancmange and have some distressing tendencies in the wet.

They're fine on gravel and similar and will probably be very good on snow, but I'm after a spare set of wheels to fit some summer tyres on. They'll probably be slightly larger and ideally black with silver rims, as that way the tyre sidewalls will be lower which should make things a little more directional!

Also looking at the STI parts catalogue and thinking the Forester really is the ultimate sleeper. It looks like it belongs on the school run but it's an Impreza underneath...

I must admit that's the thing that always worried me about bikes - if the saddle breaks there's a tube aimed at a rather sensitive area!

My Discovery cooling system only acted up once, after which I removed a bucket-sized amount of mud and dead leaves from the radiator and it behaved. I just had trouble with...

Wheel bearings
Propshaft UJs
Clutch
Alternators
Aircon failed
and when the cam belt went I decided it was time to fix and get rid! Luckily the chap who did most of the spannering on it was after a new vehicle and bought it from me, a week later I went to see a Forester S Turbo with 67k on the clock and FSH which ended up coming home with me.

I think my old KX would be slightly more effective as a self-defence weapon...

Nope, people just don't interest me anything like as much as buildings! I do try to shoot and keep moving though as it makes you less vulnerable to muggers or jobsworth rent-a-cop types.

I did try a few shots using the following technique a while ago:

Set wide angle lens to hyperfocal length
Set aperture to f8
Hold camera at hip, try to keep it level in portrait orientation
Shoot

I was using an MG and a motor wind for this. The results were surprisingly good, although I wouldn't rely on this technique.

Looking at the photo on the Dimitrov site, and the few technical details he has, I would guess it to have been similarly sized to the M 35-70mm f2.8-3.5 retracted (at 70mm, in other words).

That's quite a chunky lens by M series standards but not massive!