Seek some legal advice and find out the maximum damages they could potentially have awarded against them. Useful bargaining tool I'd have said!

I only know one other Pentax owner outside this forum (who managed to find an MX and 50/1.7 in a Dutch junk shop for under €10 - I've told them in no uncertain terms that it's worth spending more than they paid for the camera on a proper service!)

I quite enjoy the reactions you get while poking around with an old Pentax. My black ME and ME Super are still seriously elegant cameras, the MES with 40mm f2.8 will almost fit in a pocket and I recently managed to find an "Otterbox" of just the right dimensions for it.

Yup, I've got four of the M 50/2s (one of which is the later version with plastic aperture ring and a few other alterations). Only paid over £10 for one of them, and that was the one which came attached to my K1000 in 1997 or so!

One of the fungus-ridden examples joined a £5 MV1 for an experiment in ultra-cheap photography, very successful I thought.

£150 will buy the new DA 35mm f2.4, great walkabout lens as it'd make your K-r little bigger than a bridge camera.

If you want even cheaper and can deal with manual lenses then the old Pentax-M 28mm f3.5 would suit, target price for those would be between £50-£70.

Edit, I notice you say 18-200mm but at least consider a prime, the image quality is much better!

Can beat that - same lens for a fiver with a bit of fungus which took all of five minutes to clean out and doesn't seem to have done any permanent harm. Managed that twice so far!

I've got a few unusual 45s in my collection, mostly colour vinyl editions (have "Out of the Blue" by ELO on, unsurprisingly, blue vinyl for one). Also have what I believe to be an original copy of Tubular Bells complete with the wonderful note on the back about how it's best on stereo but can be played mono "at a pinch"!

In general there only seems to be any interest in cast iron baths if they're ready to use. If the enamel is crazed or damaged then the salvage dealers won't be interested and you're better off hauling it to the scrappy.

I find it wince-worthy to see 33rpm records which have been butchered for a jukebox, let alone mangled into a bowl or coaster! At least you can get clip-in inserts to replace the missing centres.

Talking of never throwing anything away I'm considering making an offer on an MX which is suffering from a mirror which doesn't always return and a squealing shutter mechanism. I'm guessing it would just be a simple flush and re-lubricate job? I wouldn't mind another one...

Interesting - I was looking at those lenses after finding my 85mm to be brilliant, but reviews suggest the 14mm suffers from weird distortion and softness?

Sad to say, you won't find anything particularly cheap wider than 28mm. The standard wide angle on full frame film cameras was a 28mm, hence the ready availability of them on the used market. 17mm would have been a fisheye then, expensive and too specialised for most photographers.

Take a look at the landscape lens thread for some ideas for ultrawides, they won't be cheap though!

I think you can definitely arrange Pentax bodies into divisions of desirability, judging by ebay prices. The one which has always puzzled me is the K1000. I've got one but I don't find it anything like as good as, say, the KX or MX. Yet the number of times I see them at a very optimistic BIN price with "Ideal student camera" in the heading...