Well Sigma have made a choice, but whether it's the right thing depends on your point of view.

The classic example is the Pentax 85mm lens. Early lenses followed the fashion of the day and were designed so that wide open they were soft, suitable for portraiture, and closed down razor sharp.

At some point the fashion changed and 85mm lenses were made to be razor sharp wide open. Whether this is good or bad depends, but it's nice to know.

Sigma it seems have made a decision to make a portrait lens for APS-C, which is fine, but the buyer needs to know that.

I suspect that there's not much advertising mileage in "our lens is soft wide open" though...

Every lens has its technical weaknesses and of course if we only measure MTF then these are all laid naked and can look pretty bad.

Photography however is a creative medium and whatever quirks a lens has can be put to good use. You've highlighted one possible use - wide apertures for milky smooth (but no doubt low resolution) portraits. Your models will love you.

On the other hand, use a macro lens for the same job and your models might not be so pleased, or the time spent in Photoshop will become a bit wearing.

When copying documents is the job in hand, then it's the macro lens every time.

Different lenses are made for different purposes and perform accordingly. I think that a lot of disappointment with lenses may be caused by buying the wrong lens for the purpose in mind. Hence one user will praise a lens whilst another will rubbish it. They are both right.

To be honest, the optical viewfinders were so poor that I think the rear screens are now superior, at least as far as compact cameras go.

For the DSLR the Live View option is quite useful for some applications, but the pentaprism is best for general use.

Absolutely pointless IMHO to spend thousands of pounds on a camera and only be able to use Sigma lenses on it.

Fovean sensors look different in some ways, but whether its better is a matter of taste. Bayer filters may in theory reduce sharpness, but in practice it doesn't seem to matter.

Now photo diodes that "see" in colour would be something else!

Is that better?

There's nothing unusual about that topic that should cause any particular problem. Maybe it's a browser issue?

You could go to Oban and from there get the ferry to Mull.

That should just about be enough for two days!

Rayco used to be a good source of chemicals. I just wonder if it isn't going to be doing it the hard way though - the C41 process is quite a specific high temperature one and it might be much easier to just have someone put them through a one hour processing system. The cost of that coupled with all the proof prints you'll get will establish which images are worth scanning and dealing with further.

On the other hand, he might have a lot of fun out of doing the job, in which case Rayco might still be a good place to start.

Perhaps you could post an example image?

It doesn't sound right in that almost any modern lens, especially an expensive prime, should be able to produce sharp images as a matter of course.

Because there is no electronic contact between camera and lens, you need to input the focal length so that the SR system will work optimally. In theory, you would input this for any focal length selected, in practice you might get away with putting in the mid point of the range.

As regards the aperture, you need to select the "Use of aperture ring" in the custom menu and set it to "permitted" - you will then be able to meter manually in stop down mode. There is no need to reset this function when returning to more modern lenses, it will be fine.