Hi Andrew,

Welcome to the forum.
As a newcomer myself I can't offer any comments regarding the 16-45. I'm not sure whether you would consider the DA* 16-50, perhaps high build quality, weather and dust sealing may be an advantage on your travels? Any how the 16-50 is a pretty sharp tool providing you stop down to f/5.6. Centre sharpness is pretty good to excellent throughout all apertures. Sorry I couldn't help with the 18-55 MKII verses the 16-45.

Hi Andrew,

Welcome to the forum

Hi Annette,

Welcome to the forum
I'm sorry but as very much a newcomer to Pentax I can't offer any experience with the lens you mention, other than the one that I recently purchased with my K20D
As Mac says I'll have to leave that to the other Pentax experts on this forum.....

Great shot
To my eye I think the second one looks more natural

Hi Ian,

Welcome to the forum
With regard to RAW converters I use CaptureOne 4 Pro
http://www.phaseone.com/4/ (I've recently upgraded from CaptureOne 4). I find it to be an excellent converter very easy to use with nice work flow capability. It seems to be particularly good at extracting every last detail out of RAW files and the highlight recovery feature is useful too. Another worth trying is RAWTherapee http://www.rawtherapee.com/index.php?mitem=2 again a very capable package which is donation rather than payware. Both work very well with the K20D but for me CaptureOne 4 edges it.

Hi David,

welcome to the forum, you're right it is a friendly place

For back up software I find Comodo BackUp http://backup.comodo.com/ to be excellent it has a no frills UI but it certainly gets the job done. Easy to set up and best of all it's free

Ian, I think they may be back in stock now because SRS confirmed shipment of mine today

Hi Rhoda,

Welcome to the forum

Nice isn't it.
I decided today to order the D-BG2 grip and AF-360FGZ flash, SRS tell me they are on their way