Wide lenses can be a bit of a disappointement for landscapes, but that's usually because the advantages are not being exploited.

They need careful composition with strong forground interest and when handled properly can give stunning results.

I would suggest checking out books on landscape photography to see what the possibilities are.

I'm puzzled that a refund could be offered that had no logic to it....

Sending a payment rather than a partial refund just might have been beyond his control. Once only I wanted to send a partial refund and PayPal came up with "you can only make a full refund for this item" which was a bit mysterious. I couldn't see anything that was different about it in any way, but there's something there obviously. If anyone knows the answer to that I'd be glad if you'd share it!

I'll be interested to hear the outcome and hope it works out OK.

Better to have one lens and take many photos than have many lenses and remain at home confused.

I'm still of a mind that our CRTs are better, although Sue's new Toshiba laptop and my Sony laptop both have very creditable screens.

The day of reckoning will of course eventually arrive and we'll have to replace, but I'm happy to wait for now.

We use a Selphy on holiday to send people custom postcards. The print quality is superb.

All's well that ends well!

Lenses are very carefully assembled, I presume on machines that have a fixed amount of torque when tightening. The precision is very high and even then decentering can be significant. The DIY option is not one that I'd have any confidence in, especially without the proper tools.

It's very difficult to see what else may be amiss without having the lens and camera to hand. Do you know someone else with a Pentax SLR who could try the lens on their camera?

As a first step I would clean the contacts on lens and camera with a soft cloth. Then remount the lens and try again.

Check that the lens focusing rotates fully whilst the lens is off the camera and also check manual focusing when on the camera. In the latter case ignore the green hexagon and trust in your eyes to see what is happening. Then finally switch to AF and try that again.

We did it for school photos (anyone remember those revolving cameras?) so if you can keep hundreds of kids still for 30 seconds, I'm sure adults can do it.

There's always one head that looks blurred!