In the UK, your contract is nwith the supplier first and foremost. If you buy from SRS, for example, and a fault occurs withing 2 years, then contact SRS for instructions on how to proceed with a warranty claim.

No camera shake I think, 2 second self timer and very solid tripod. Not the only shot either.

Just a poor sample of the lens IMHO.

Stefan is quite serious in what he says and clearly not trolling here.

You are free to disagree, but that does not have to involve personalities. Disagree with counter arguments by all means.

You are seeing the sRGB space on your monitor reagrdless, you are printing the sRGB space on your printer and you need sRGB for web images.

If you mix Adobe RGB and sRGB in your workflow you will get weak colour in your images. Whatever you do, check that the camera and Photoshop are both set to the same colour space.

There are possible reasons for using the wider gamut of Adobe RGB but I don't find it necessary.

Low key is all about dark shadows and mystery.

The traditional black cat in a coal cellar would be good. More realistically, if you Google low key photography I'm sure you'll get lots of links to examples. Also try Wikipedia.

Indeed, if you can set the zoom lens at 55mm and f4 you are a remarkable photographer....

Actually I used a small aperture for the test because I use the kit lens at f11 or f16 for eBay photos of often fairly small objects. It's an excellent lens for this purpose, clearly better than my 55mm.

I was demonstrating the effects of aperture recently to an audience of around 70 photographers and how changing aperture affects sharpness.

And it does. A lens will peak in terms of quality at the middle apertures, often around f8 but maybe at around f5.6 for faster lenses or f11 for older designs.

Lens sharpness does fall off towards f22, although DOF obviously increases, so these two factors need to be weighed against each other.

The better the lens the more the effect will be noticed. If you get a poor lens, usually a cheap older zoom, then it is possible that sharpness will peak at f16 or f22, but this is because the overall performance is not very good anyway.

For optimum quality, provided there is enough DOF, I would tend to use f8 or f11. Once we get to f16 the results of diffraction are becoming visible and by f22 definitely so. This is why many older lenses only go to f16.

If they don't tell you the price then it will be very difficult for you to buy from them!

Very strange.

Now sorted. Yes, it will be a short one, but it gets us back on schedule.

It may be that a recall was unecessary because the fault was actually rare. The point is we don't know.