And it's when I am away in Skye....

I reckon it's the 1.4 TC, don't want a new body just yet, still enjoying the K-5.

I'm in no hurry for a new Pentax camera, spent so much already this year on the Sigma 150-500 and Nikkor 70-200 that I will have to save for whatever Pentax bring out next - K-3 or the new mid-range zoom, or FF, in the meantime I will continue to enjoy my K-5, Z-1 and Z-1p

Stick a 50 Canon or Nikon of the same vintage on an EOS or low end Nikon and they work NOT

I love Pentax

Before you send it off.....

take a jeweller's screwdriver and turn the screw-drive, depends on how much resistence you get will let you know whether if it's the SDM that has died....Twice I have had my DA* lenses falter on me, the focussing ring was stiff, a twiddle with the screwdriver released the mechanism, which not long afterwards was working fine...If this doesn't do the trick as Mike says JPSS will fix it - standard price is £180 (might have gone up) my DA* was significantly improved post repair.

Let me know how you get on Phil, I dropped mine last week while it was on the Z-1, it works fine and everything looks ok but I just need to be sure...

Canon EX600-RT came out at £600....settled at around£400, SB-910 is around the £300-400 mark....so any more for the AF540 would be difficult to justify...

as JR says the prices should surely settle, but we are dealing with Pentax pricing though

Made in Japan, be wary, trigger voltage is high on earlier models.

Made somewhere else - should be ok.

Good luck Andy, as you will need it.

Good advice from Fritz... just get some lowdown on the politics, you'll be amazed to find that some people will not stand other people...not forgetting the extended step family - these tend to stretch the group photos out quite a lot....

Don't forget the photographer is the designated victim, something goes off plan, blame the photographer....

I found it easy to interact with the friends, ushers who helped me as I was working alone most of the time..

Fingers crossed for good weather

ok. you got the SLR that ticked all your boxes and you feel the K-5 doesn't bring anything new for you...that's fine

Many of us have bought into each new generation, sometimes missing a model, for me the K-7 wasn't such an advance over the K20D and I prefer the ergonomics of the old K10D/K20D - the K-5 did move the goalposts sufficiently for me to get one. Likewise, much as I covet the K5ii/S I will bypass those and see what the K-3 looks like..

I don't think anyone disagrees with you about the general performance of the K-7, it is now something of a forgotten model, the Samsung chip was very good, but the K-5 does trump it at extremely high ISOs, not quite D3 rivalling, but good enough.

Fine pics by the way

Can we look at it this way?

You can buy a NEW K-5 for £440, assume you trade in the same camera you could be lucky to receive £300 in p/ex. You'd still need to find £400 just for a K-5ii....the K-7 being an older model would command a lower resale figure and I would assume that in many cases:

a) that there were many who p/ex-d when SRS had their £100 offer took the plunge then
b) those who didn't now realise the camera is worth more to them than the small amount they would be offered so are happy to wait for the next gen of cameras.

Nigel - out of curiosity - what did you have before the K-7?