We largely for ourselves just bought the things we wanted as we went along this year - spontaneous presents as needed - but Sue is very happy with her Kindle plus other oddments.

She's getting a bonus I-10 soon as I had £100 in Amazon vouchers sitting in my account and that's the perfect match!

There is indeed a standard petal hood for the 52mm filter thread lenses. The Mk II and WR and DA-L lenses are all the same configuration. They are very good lenses.

Not much success so far! There are four link options in Photobucket next to your image. Choose the fourth and highlight and copy it. Then paste it into a message box here. Your picture will be displayed.

I've edited the link in your first post and now the image shows correctly.

You will be very lucky to find the Currys/Dixons/PC World offer now as the web offers have finished.

Link to Nikon advert removed.....

The DA-L is exactly the same as the DA but with plastic mount, no Quick shift and no lens hood. Optically and speed wise they should be the same.

As regards technique, try releasing the shutter just before the point you want - there is a lag for your response time and the release of the shutter (the latter about 90ms I would think) - and with practice you should improve your timing of the action.

Quick shift is a feature that can be very useful, but we have lived without it previously so it's not essential.

After AF has locked on, if you keep the half pressure on the shutter release you can tweak the point of focus using the manual focus ring. This can be especially useful for close up and macro shots.

However, you should already have this feature and you don't seem to be aware of it, so it may not be as important to your own style of photography.

In terms of image quality, it will be more dependent on the skill of the photographer than any difference between Pentax and Nikon lenses. Both will have different characteristics, both will be good.

The skill is something else and that comes from practice, practice practice...whichever camera you have there will be advantages that can be exploited or missed depending on the user.

Good MX cameras go for quite high prices sometimes. Getting a good one can be tricky, so buy carefully and inspect if possible. Bear in mind that cameras may have been stored with the shutter cocked, which weakens the springs and probably means a service will be needed.

An as-new MX would be very nice indeed.

It would be strange if a Pentax forum suggested buying anything but the Pentax option. So, buy the Pentax option is good advice anyway as it happens. The K-x is excellent, gives access to a wide variety of new and old lenses and is amazing value for money.

Lens hoods are not provided with the DA-L lenses in the package but can be obtained either at a low cost (copies on eBay and Amazon) or a higher cost (Pentax ones from SRS)

Either way, the K-x will not diappoint and is arguably a more elegant design than the Nikon.

Use the centre point focus option and you know where the camera is focusing - you can see it click into sharpness anyway in the viewfinder, using human eyes!