On a similar topic - HOW is the mirror held up for prolonged periods (2 sec timer and live view)? LV will time out if you leave it for too long. Can repeated use of it wear anything out or otherwise damage the mechanism?

I just entered "pentax lens hood 18-55mm" into Google and was presented with several , both real and copies, from £5 - £22, from dealers and from Ebay

Oh good. I was concerned that I had had a narrow escape having failed to secure one. I shall now try again.

They clearly take their festivities seriously
Nice capture

Thank you John.
Do you mean anything later than a Spotmatic?

Most impressive

However many attempts it took to get these it was worth every one of them - superb

Taittinger Champagne here. (only happens once a year so we enjoy it)

HAPPY 2016 to everyone, whatever you drink or whatever shutter button you click

The reason I threw out the Pentax utilities was the sheer, boring waiting time to load, process and save just one image. It took an eternity! There is a difference between the outputs but unless you are going to produce a whopping great poster it hardly matters.

My general M.O. with FastStone is to load the RAW and go to Levels (CTRL+L). If there is a great gap on the right of the histogram, I reduce it with the slider and then adjust the contrast with the middle slider button. Crop (X), resize (CTRL R) and sharpen as required (CTRL U). (CTRL S) saves it. As you can see, there need not be a lot of mouse work at all.

FastStone Image Viewer is free and it knocks spots off a lot of commercial jobs. It does exactly what you want and how you want, with a minimum of fuss