The battery compartment cover is the one gripe I have with the AF360FGZ, I think its flimsy and also prone to coming open.

Mike;
Have you considered a strong elastic band for holding the cover on?

Changing a screen should present no problems IF you know what your doing (does the K100D have interchangeable screens?)
However IMHO, assuming the ME screen is the same thickness (and if it isn't dont even consider the idea) you'll probably damage it beyond use when you try and trim it down, these things are extremely delicate, thats assuming its plastic, what if you rip your ME apart and find the focusing screen is ground glass? I cant see you trimming that down very easily.

I have seen screens on ebay for the istD, complete with the "tweezers" for changing them, did I do it myself? did I hell, I got Pentax to do it when I had myD cleaned, it cost me £50, including the £8 for the cost of the screen.

Do yourself a favour and contact Pentax and see what they cam offer.

Talking about other brand lenses etc is probably prohibited!

I'll stick with this forum, such nice people y'know.

Paul,
Why dont you try a set of extention tubes on some of your other lenses before going to the expense of a specific macro lens? the tubes will still come in useful later, the pics I linked to were taken using the Tamron with extension tubes.

As for producing pics like mine, IMHO macro is all about knowing your gear and being lucky, I was lucky that the greenbottle sat there for as long as it did so I was able to take my time (I only took two shots) the bees are a different matter, I must have shot over 50 "frames" to get a half dozen decent images.

Paul
I can vouch for the 90mm Tamron SP, though mine is getting on a bit and weighs like a brick!

I got these with it:

http://s80.photobucket.com/albums/j168/impotentspider/Macro%20Work/

Accumulator.....should have seen that a mile off, the old brain cells aren't what they used to be

Accus? Dutch?

would you care to elaborate?

Heres something to cheer everyone up after the stress of preparing for the holidays

Just finished reading a lens test in the new "Digital SLR" magazine

the Pentax and Samsung 50-200 scored quite well, the test said the Pentax was one of the best in the bunch for build quality, the manual focus ring was best on test and it also noted the addition of a distance scale, also good performance throughout the range on optics, the only real gripe was the autofocus hunting in low light. (The overall winner was the Tamron)

Pentax and Samsung (both tested seperately but same results)

Handling *****
Features ***
Autofocus ***
Image Quality ****
Value for Money ****

Canon EF 55-200

Handling **
Features ***
Autofocus *****
Image Quality ***
Value for Money ***

Confucious say;
Man who have Pentax may struggle in low light, but man who have Canon get rubbish image straight away, he also have plastic lens mount!

A lot of "SHOUTING" going on in this topic, maybe the problem is noise!

typical!

I buy mine and the price comes down! LOL