Not a good day. I head out to garage to collect the Discovery after having some suspension problems sorted, and at 60mph on the way back I get "Doink" and the engine cutting out. I think the cambelt went. Garage were able to send a recovery wagon and drag it back, at least on this engine it should be relatively simple to fix (new pushrods, maybe rocker arms, and definitely belt).

More sensibly priced primes. How about a DA 135mm f3.5 or 200mm f4 at around the £150-£200 mark and with similar quality to the DA 35mm f2.4?

It depends on why it's stuck, really. If you look at the black section of the lens barrel is it still straight compared to the rest of the lens body? I've had lenses which had evidently been dropped before where the focusing screw had been knocked crossthreaded, leading to jammed focus.

Another possibility is that if the lens has been treated roughly there may be a bit of broken plastic jammed in the mechanism.

Quite likely - I'm still a bit green where this photo manipulation stuff is concerned and tend to just tweak brightness/contrast and more recently levels until I get something which looks similar to what I remember seeing on the day!

I have seen some really odd reasons for giving a lens a poor review, from "I won't give it full marks because I only give those to Ltds" to apparently basing their entire opinion on the fact that the lens was a two touch zoom design rather than a one touch like the rest of the M series zooms.

I've got the M 40-80mm (for example) which has absolutely stinking reviews on the other site, but it really isn't that bad. It does have barrel distortion which shows up if your subject has long straight lines, but it's sharp enough, relatively fast, and the macro function works well. I shot a couple of rolls of film with it on an ME Super last October and the distortion is only painful in one shot from the eighty-odd slides, which was of a spiral staircase on the side of a rather angular building with the lens set to 40mm.

You know you spent far too long playing with Lego Technic when:

You look at the Google Doodle for Richard Trevithick's 240th birthday and think "Those gears are locked solid"!

I can understand museums saying "no flash", as many items in their collections need to be kept in low light to preserve them. What annoys me is when this becomes "no photography".

Depending on which two you could still hit the jackpot. The 18mm panfocal/focus free and the zoom seem to be the rarest. I've got a couple of working bodies, the 18mm and 24mm lenses, and the tan leather case which was sold to carry a complete system.

Thanks, but already fixed!

For anyone else who has a similar problem the wire connects to a circuit board which is screwed to the top of the viewfinder moulding. There are two boards stacked one on top of the other, you want the lower of the two as the upper one connects to the two rear contacts of the hotshoe for flash ready/flash mode. Simply find a circuit between the centre of the PC socket and a solder tab on this board, that's the right place to connect the hot shoe wire to.

It seems to work perfectly. The Program flash I clipped on fired and communicated properly with the camera.

I definitely think digital photography has changed things in this respect. Most people didn't bother having their film photos enlarged beyond the standard snapshot prints, so all those cheap 3rd party zooms didn't look too bad. With digital you can crop and enlarge an image to your heart's content, so any deficiencies in lens sharpness will be highlighted mercilessly.

I know I now find myself cursing the printer for its inability to match the sharpness of the images on my computer screen!

I would say that if you want a new screen you need to buy something like the Katzeye which is made for the job, rather than one of the cut-down 35mm screens you can find cheaply from far eastern ebay sellers. I bought one of the latter, used it for a month, then went back to standard as it was just too dark for me. I think the main problem was that the split prism dominated the view, as obviously after the screen is cropped it occupies a larger percentage of the viewfinder space.