Nice one Steve.
I gave up on Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity et al as being too complicated for my limited brain to understand (genuine comment, not sarcasm!). I'm left with simple but usually effective Topaz and Faststone. I similarly can't comprehend the fuss over RAW except that it's demanded by serious contests to prove it isn't an AI generated image. I now save as both for that reason but I never touch the RAW versions and always work from the jpegs. I've tried both and can't see one iota of difference!

Getting back to the point - the TAIR still comes out on top.

I just bought it (sight unseen so I will be fingers crossed!)

You got the lighting absolutely right to display the astonishing quality of these carvings.
Somebody did them; nobody will ever know who they were. (What a common lament).

You can get problems with K1s as well - I have two and both do the same thing. Leave them idle for a few days and, after power up, the first shutter release causes the mirror to go up - and that's it! The shutter does nothing at all and the sensor records what it sees - nothing. When you 'view' the result it is simply a black frame. A second press of the button might release it; it might not. Sometimes turning the camera off and on again won't shift it but (oddly) removing and then replacing the battery will cause the mirror to drop back into place.
Thinking about the OP report at the start of this thread (Also with a K3) reminds me of a similar problem.
I got into a bad habit with my K3ii of holding the half press of the shutter while manually focusing, waiting for the confirming bleep! Eventually (3-4 seconds) it threw terrifying wobblies that sounded like a violent whirring noise. Mike's comment about shutter flap sounds similar. I sent it to John Pye but they could find nothing wrong with it (and they didn't charge me a penny - not even for return postage). After that I was scared to use the thing but I noted what I was doing every time I used it thereafter, which is how I discovered its dislike of someone holding the button half way down for long periods. Click -Whirrrrrr! I never do that now.

I am still getting my head around some American reviews and comments about TAY-EER lenses in general. I have no idea how it ought to be pronounced so does anyone have an authoritative version?

What to do when it's freezing cold, wet and foggy? You stay indoors and play with your camera!

I saw lots of water droplets on a bare cherry tree right at the end of the garden so I put a DA*300mm on a K1, on a tripod looking through the patio windows. Since nothing was moving, I dialed the ISO down to 100 and set up the electronic shutter to fire with a remote release.
Here is what I got - the best of a bad bunch....



Having looked at the results I wondered if the Meyer Optik 300 would do better? All settings remained the same, other than the need to focus manually. Focus was on the branch above the solitary droplet right in the middle. (This was kept throughout). The film era monster lens produced a somewhat better result. Also, because it didn't have to faff about, cycling from one end to the other in various attempts to autofocus, it produced the image in about a third of the time!



Enter a venerable Soviet Tair f4 300mm - the simplest of all constructions, and the longest since it is basically a telescope with an adjustable iris. It got the focus bang on, there were no colour casts and next to no CAs. The Pentax DA* in particular produced a lurid purplish colour cast throughout which remained slightly visible even after considerable therapy in Faststone Image Viewer.



So, here we have a modern, mega expensive offering at £1K plus producing a poor result, a late film era bokeh monster (emphasis on the monster bit!) that cost me £40 due to it being mint. It produced a very acceptable result and the winner, at £5 (courtesy of Lennybloke), and the oldest of the three ran off with the biscuit.

I tried hard to keep the playing field level and worked on each image with the Topaz AI suite to get the best result possible. I have complained about the DA* in the past and while it IS possible that I have ended up with a duff copy I think Pentax have been cooking the books with it.

It came out well before the full frame K1 and received lots of praise but having released the K1 they found themselves possessed of a good crop frame lens when everybody was being exhorted to buy the new full frame camera so they stated it WAS full frame compatible. Is it? I don't know but I do know that an FA* on a K1 will easily see off a DA*. The difference is that the FA* was designed to cover a full frame. The DA* wasn't and the only way it appears to do so is if the camera software was tweaked to enlarge it. (And they are only now starting to admit to all manner of hidden software tweaks in the K1 that have hitherto only been available in Japan).

OK - speculative crap! Get out the K3ii with the crop frame that the DA* was originally designed for.



The very first K1 image, above looks as if it was suffering from back focus (the twig back left and down from the actual focus point is crack on) suggesting a need to change the camera's AF settings. Compare it with this one, where that twig is slightly OOF and the actual focal point IS bang on. You can go all the way along the main branch and find little wrong with it. The full frame and the crop frame versions are quite different. Which is why my DA*300 is normally only paired with the K3ii.

I still prefer the Tair version! £5 vs £1,+++. So which way would you vote?

Have a great 2026 Spad!

The short answer is, ALWAYS politely to decline the call and ring them back on a known, clean number. As to accents. the Leeds based 1st Direct call center will, 95% of the time, produce someone with the thickest of Glaswegian accents. Geordie or Glasgie are equally impenetrable!

Nostradamus .... "You will only know the seasons by the falling of the leaves."

That camera certainly delivers the goods. Pity there's no flippy screen! I'd be happy with all of these.