Well I'm looking to seeing some results. From what I've seen so far it looks just excellent. It's interesting what you say about the low light focusing, which was the one supposed real weakness that I could see, another nail in the coffin for my bank balance.

Given that it cost £49 instead of £599 I strongly suspect this is not the fifth generation Ricoh GR rather the first generation Ricoh GRD.

I was seriously tempted by the GRDIV but I went for a good offer on the Q. I will probably now get a Ricoh GR and a GRD (whichever I can find a good deal on) as there is a firm place for each.

On the other hand if you did get a GR for £49 then



They do look like brilliantly thought out cameras.

Yes but those who buy the top end models also buy lenses. Plus people who buy the entry level low margin model go on to buy a posher camera later on. So you need to attract these buyers too.

It seems to me that Pentax dslr's have converged into a product range with little differentiation between models.

I'm sure though that this will change very shortly and the K50 will fit into a more sensible line-up to suit a wider market.

It was never intended to be a fair test. 30mm vs 15mm isn't fair anyway. I only went for f16 on the 15 in order to get streaks on the water in the foreground, which was the intended shot with the 15:




Nevertheless, I find it an interesting comparison, I'd not even heard about the K30 until I bought it on impulse. Legacy lenses were one reason that attracted me to Pentax in the first place and it's nice to discover these hidden gems, who can hold their own after all these years. The K30 more than holds it own.

The images are tweaked, but more or less equally so.

Plus even my fiercest critic quite likes the image so I thought I'd show it. Good point Robin, it's a really nice stretch of river that I shall be exploring further.

The K35/2 is a hen's teeth lens I believe. What would your budget be for one in good nick?

The first was taken with the K30 f2.8 (well done Bjørn) and a needle and thread applied to the results. The second the DA15 (at f16). Can't tell you what the aperture was on the K.

As I said, not a scientific test and of course two very different focal lengths. I prefer the results from the K30 in this instance. The shutter speeds didn't make that much difference, hardly any given the conditions. The K30 wasn't a tenth the price of the DA15, but it was a tenth the price of am FA31 and it is more than a tenth that lens.

I like this kind of real world comparison. I also like flower shots with very little in focus. Keep 'em coming.

I'm not fussed whether or not I win or whether the judge likes my image or not. The reason why I entered that particular competition was to support a competition with few entries. So to have an image simply dismissed means I'm not going to enter a liberal interpretation again to the same judge.

As a judge there are of course advantages to setting a narrow topic. After setting some quite broad topics which attracted rather large fields I was tempted to see if I could do better than Night Nature.

There was a previous competition on football where disappointment was expressed on the low number of entries, then quite a few of them were disqualified for being off topic. Perfectly good and imaginative interpretations I thought, but it was clear that this judge preferred a very strict interpretation of narrow themes. So I really couldn't be bothered again.