It's quite a nice lens but not one that's very sought-after unfortunately. The last one to sell on eBay was a minty example with caps and case, it went for £28.

Good luck!

I preferred it to the 35/2 in terms of image, but of course the 35/2 has the advantages of AF and an extra half a stop of speed. The differences between them at mid-aperture are non-existent IMO, but the Flek was always just so freakishly sharp wide open and had very pleasant bokeh for a wide(ish) lens.

Give it a whirl! If you buy it for £100 and don't like it then you'll get your money back (probably a little more) no problem.

The one caveat I'd give with all CZJ lenses is that they're not as nicely made as Takumars. They're certainly rugged, but they lack the finesse of the Pentax lenses and aren't quite as enjoyable to use (again IMO). Check that the aperture closes to all positions and is snappy when the rear pin is pushed in - if not then the blades need cleaning and that's a royal pain...

I've had three copies of the Flektogon 35 and sold them all on eBay for prices between £120-160, so I'd say that £100 is cheap but not *that* cheap.

They are superb lenses, better than any other 35mm I'd tried until the DA35 came along (including various Takumar incarnations and the Samsung-branded FA35/2). I sold my last one once I realised that despite its many excellent qualities it would never displace the DA35 and I try to avoid duplicating focal lengths.

Money received, your Fotosnaiper will be on its way to you tomorrow - I'm sure you'll like it

Certainly is

I see you're new so I'll send you a PM - check your message box shortly.

Very nice! Glad it found a good home

Shorting the contacts won't cause any problem, but having a flange on the adapter means the lenses you put on it won't focus to infinity as they'll be sitting too far forward.

I've tried several K>M42 adapters and the genuine Pentax one is by far the best made, but I've had acceptable results using third party ones that fit flush with the throat of the mount.

But in that scenario where exactly are the cost savings for the manufacturer? Stripping out software won't save a single penny in manufacturing costs and the camera would be a much harder sell to the majority of buyers who do want those features.

If anything, the cost of "crippling" and old model would then increase its cost - it'll be a very brave marketing department who takes that one on!

I think that's a more realistic vision of where things are headed. As cameras become ever more versatile and have more features crammed into them (like it or not, that's what will happen) then the menu systems will come to resemble a small Operating System like the ones in use on mobile phones.

This could actually be the answer to many peoples' prayers! With a powerful OS the camera could be customised to a level unthinkable with today's models. You could have the option to use the camera "Old-Skool" where there would be the very minimum of options, all controlled by external buttons/wheels; and other modes for, say, videographers or point-and-shooters. Each owner would then find the same camera tuned for their own preferences with as much (or little) in way of features that takes their fancy.

Personally, I'd like to see JPEG presets that mimic certain films (Fuji have done this in some of their compacts but obviously only using a database of Fuji emulsions). It would be great to just be able to scroll through, say, Kodachrome, Reala, FP4+, etc on a shot-by-shot basis - with a powerful OS (preferably open source so that clever folk could write their own code and pass it around) all these sorts of things become possible.

That's where I see digital cameras headed anyway, and I don't think it's an entirely bad future.

Sigma already have done this with their SDXX series but I've never seen a single one "in the wild", which suggests that (contrary to what we often read and say on forums such as this) there's not exactly an orderly queue forming for such a camera.

If Pentax (or Nikon, or Canon, or Sony, or whoever) was to release such a beast then I'd expect pricing to be in line with other ultra-low volume cameras such as the Leica M9. So the question is; would you be prepared to spend 8x the price for a stripped-down version of the camera you already have? If I was very rich I might consider it, otherwise I can't see it happening to be honest...