Personally I doubt it. The price is already very good and it's selling. The price may come down in the future if a 645D II appears on the horizon.

Can't say what the exact relationship was, but it looks as though Pentax and Tokina did co-operate on a number of lenses, as did Tamron and Pentax. Who did what exactly remains a mystery, but some lenses appeared in the guise of both makes.

The 16-50mm and 50-135mm seem to be mirrored by Tokina. The 18-250mm seems to be mirrored by Tamron. The difference was that Tamron offered a Pentax fit version of their own lens whereas Tokina do not.

The prices of all marques increased, but the timing varied from make to make as the new batches of stock arrived. The prices of all lenses have now stabilised again and they are looking rather good value in some cases.

It constantly changes, so if we bought into a system on the grounds of price now then by the time we were ready to replace or extend our collection things could be quite different anyway.

I think you've just invalidated the warranty...

It isn't quite the same lens. Weather sealing, SMC coating and of course Pentax construction around the basic lens cell.

It would be worth checking that the card reader is capable of reading 32GB cards. If not, then asking it to is asking for trouble.

Thank you for posting the links to various tests. These days tests are very difficult to compare because the camera/lens is being tested as a combination and all the tests used different set ups over a number of years. It's not even really possible to compare one tester's results with another's. The 16-50mm is being tested on a K10D, which is not how we are going to use it now.

The worst one is RiceHigh's, which is second hand and we only have his interpretation of something else.

Reading the tests it's clear that there's much more to lenses than the overall figures, as I said in my own review of the 18-135mm. The bald test results do not tell the whole story about any lens.

The tests also restrict themselves to examination of the MTF50 figures and we really need the MTF20 graphs as well.

There's a lot of information on the web, much of it flawed in one way or another, and certainly having its influence on buyers. There's no answer to it really.

This is a duplicated subject, so I'll close this thread.

I've moved this to lenses as it's really a discussion.

Which reviews?