Probably the best set of these so far, really excellent.

The Voigtlander cameras are superbly made, but suffer from age and from over complexity where they use leaf shutters. The more recent Cosina made products are fine, but are probably not a first choice because there are low numbers about, so perhaps fewer spares, and they don't have the classic feel of the Spotmatic anyway.

This site is brand specific as mentioned by John K, but just for the record I've owned original 1959-vintage Bessamatics that were gorgeous , but operationally not a patch on the Pentax Spotmatic.

I'd stick with the Spotmatic.

The technique is to release the shutter before the bird is in the place you want so that the shutter lag is taken into account. This might be in the region of 10-20ms. It's enough for something to move, so the AF version would need to have predictive capabilities built in.

The 16GB card might well be an SDHC, which won't work.

You need a plain SD card, so maybe something around 4GB would be suitable.

Hopefully, as we really enjoy Whitby anyway and the Goth weekend is a bonus.

Not on this evening, but yes. Unfortunately shot on some of the non-Pentax lenses i had with me for review purposes....

We try to find interesting cottages to hire for our UK holidays. This was the latest, just a couple of weeks ago.


That was different! Found it on www.cottages.com located in the centre of Anglesey, just a few miles north of Llangefni.

The image was shot on the Pentax Q-S1 with the 06 15-45mm lens.

I use centre point only for all subjects as I'm the only one who knows where I want to focus. When using any of the DSLR marques I don't think it's possible to generalise about how good/bad they are as they all fail in certain respects and all succeed in others.

I suspect that part of the problem with being an existing Pentax user can be summed up by the experience of a friend of mine who bought into the syustem with a Samsung GX10 and then GX20. He also bought all sorts of low cost independent lenses. Then he moved to a very high end Canon with fast L lenses and concluded that Canon made better cameras and lenses. He could have upgraded his Pentax kit and achieved the same end result.

However, the essence of this thread could be that we already have Pentax cameras and lenses that we're happy enough with, so how do we shoot faster and better for those stunning bird pictures? My solution is centre point focus and the 150-450mm or even the 75-300mm FA lens, which is noisy but fast. Sue does very well with the HD Pentax-DA 55-300mm and the 1.4x converter. The alternative is manual focus, which is better in some situations.

I have found that the Pentax on centre spot focuses better through mazes of branches than most other marques.

There's probably an element of truth in all sides of the AF argument.

I've used a lot of different camera lately and there are some that track flying birds better than Pentax, but equally well some that struggle with subjects that would not have been a problem with Pentax. There is a marque I wouldn't buy because of its focusing performance, for the type of images I shoot. It has plenty of other good qualities for other photographers' needs though, so it's just "swings and roundabouts" in the end.

HDR is best used sparingly IMHO, but I do use Photomatix with 7 exposures,