Zoom lenses have come on by leaps and bounds in recent years, but even so, a good short-range zoom will generally tend to beat any long-range zoom (such as the 18-135).

Rather than buy a Tamron (good though they may be), I should follow Gareth's advice and get a Pentax 16-50 (if you can afford it). This is a splendid lens that (until I drove off with it on the top of my car) was never off my main camera.

Long experience has taught me that you'll never regret buying the best. And as a general purpose lens, the 16-50 is certainly that.

G

Cash up front, and no going back, would be the answer.

G

Now, who was saying that Pentax doesn't produce any long lenses?

Were I in the market for 600mm (and I'm not), then 250-600 would seem to be a very much more usable and flexible proposition than a 600mm prime.

G

Well we have drifted away from the topic, and I regret to say that I will be continuing in the same vein.

The cost of a lens is directly related to how many will be sold. They could produce a 600mm 1:4 for £300 if enough people could be relied upon to buy it. But the fact is that it is hard to take good pictures hand-held with very long lenses, which is why I usually choose my 300mm in preference to my 400mm, and then crop the image.

So I wouldn't buy a 600mm if it cost more than 50 quid. I just wouldn't use it enough to justify the outlay. The market for such a lens is tiny, whatever the price, and as Robin says, those who NEED a 600mm should switch to Canon.

However, I wonder whether Pentax shouldn't be brave and make and sell a 500mm for say £600.00, as a loss-leader to keep people like Oggy on board.

If they were to sell it in a T-mount configuration, they might sell rather a lot, and actually make a profit.

G

What exactly has he done to upset you?

G

Hard to be useful when you're paralysed and confined to a wheelchair after being shot six times by Al-Qaeda.

Nonetheless, he manages it, and he even goes to Afghanistan occasionally to report on the war there.

But of course, he's not nearly as useful as the person whose sneering post I am responding to.

G

A Leica user, I think.

Next best thing.

G

There was a Kenya version too:

There was a wild Kikuyu boy
Jerogi wa Kamau...

He ended up joining the Mau Mau, and it all ended very unhappily, as these things tend to do.

G

America wanted access to markets controlled by Britain, which is probably fair enough. However, the pressure to grant independence before the peoples of Africa were ready was cynical in the extreme, and has resulted in the chaos we see now.

Interestingly, this was all happening while segregation and other racist measures were common in the US South.

There is now a sizeable middle class in Kenya, and if it were not for the endemic corruption, the country might have a chance. As it is, I am not hopeful.

As for Obama, he might do well to reflect on the fact that were it not for the British stopping the East African slave trade (which fed Arabia), he might not be around today. Slaving expeditions went as far inland as the African Great Lakes, and on into the Congo, and were big business.

Try googling Tippu Tip. And the Nile books of Alan Moorehead offer a very readable account of life before the British arrived. Nasty, brutish, and short was not the half of it.

G

When you are no longer a relative newcomer we shall not hold it against you if you retract that view.

As I suspect you will.

G