Cost is definitely part of the proble, and that applies equally well to the 645D.

Most of us seem to chicken out once costs get beyond about £1000, some at a lot less than that.

A professional need is one thing, but as an amateur desire it can get a bit daunting.

It's very disappointing for you. I guess the potential is always there that a seal may fail or not be properly sealing from the outset. It might have to be a replacement, because once water gets in that could be bad news.

I have heard of very few seal leaks from any manufacturer, although I seem to recall that Canon have had a recognisable problem, but I'm not sure of the details.

It depends on what you want/need to do.

For example, you don't have a macro lens, a fast prime lens or indeed the mentioned fisheye. Do you need these?

The trouble is, maybe we but the first prime, think it's amazing and then buying more primes follows. The there's the constant decision making - which lenses do I take with me? Zoom convenience of prime quality? But the differences can be subtle....

And so we tie ourselves in knots and buy yet more lenses. All this is very good for manfacturers of lenses.

You could use a card reader instead, which tends to be a more convenient way to transfaer images to the computer.

They are widely available and very low cost.

Maybe, although people stretch themselves to get something special and it doesn't necessarily follow that there's anything more in the pot at any given time.

Hard to judge as people's priorties are different. One person might spend a fortune on a lens, someone else think that was a total waste of money and buy a car instead.....and so on.

It's mentioned in the little instruction book that sometimes comes with the lenses. The 16-45mm lens hood will cause vignetting with the built in flash at wider focal lengths.

At this stage in the game, any full frame camera would have to offer something very different. Just producing one with great image quality isn't enough. Why would we ditch our APS-C cameras for something bigger, heavier, more expensive (probably) and needing a whole new set of lens purchases?

My feeling is there would have be something very exceptional about such a camera to make the market place jump up and take notice.

You should be using sRGB on the web.

These are beautiful lenscaps and this one must have had some very rough treatment.

Personally I'd buy a new one and let whatever I got from eBay ease the loss a little.

If you're very lucky it's always possible that you'll get more than the new price for your damaged cap, such is the nature of the marketplace.

You won't notice any difference unless you are doing something very specific and then you'll probably be doing some job of work.

Everything depends on how much manipulation is being done and the final output size and purpose, but for normal use there's no problem with 8 bit.

I'll bet most users haven't even really noted that 16 bit is there.