The K20D is a significant and worthwhile upgrade.

It's also easy to use the K10D and K20D together as the operation of both is virtually identical. So a K10D as backup to a K20D makes good sense.

Apart from Premium JPEG and the largest possible pixel count, sRGB, Natural, +1 sharpness is where I have settled. Every other quality setting I have left untouched.

As regards handling: Centre-weighted metering, linking AE and AF points, centre point AF.

No it's not just you. We use Premium JPEG almost all the time. Less messing, top quality results.

I've not looked at the link yet, but we have one of these lenses and it performs very well. Sue uses the lens for her wildlife shots at long range. Far better than any zoom with a converter would be.

My advice would be to forget converters. Quality is often dire. In fact it usually is, especially with zooms.

Yes it does seem to raise blood pressure when this sort of thing starts.

I can see why it does, and I can see both sides of this. There is no answer to it.

However, no need to get any more wound up over it as we have heard both sides and the debate will rage on for ever, if not here then elsewhere I'm sure.

I'll stop this as soon as the plot becomes clearly lost and we start going round in circles again. Stay cool guys and girls.

"Fast" refers to the lens compared with the norm for lenses of that focal length.

So in 50mm lenses, f1.4 and f1.2 are fast. F1.7 and f2 are the norm. F2.8 is slow and often a macro lens.

An 85mm f2 would be the norm an 85mm f1.4 is fast.

f2.8 zooms are fast.

And so on.

Fast lenses are heavier, bulkier, need more elements and are much more expensive. They do allow easier manual focusing in dull light and also higher shutter speeds if the reduced DOF at wider apertures is acceptable.

The shutter is closed and the sensor covered when changing lenses, so damage at that point does seem rather unlikely.

We have a Nikon Coolscan IV, which has since been superceded by the Coolscan V. Dedicated scanners like this are best for high quality results, but there are more rough-and-ready ones that are considerably cheaper.

It takes a long time to scan a slide or negative properly, so the idea of scanning hundreds is not a pleasant thought at all.

In the event, we scan very few and I can't remember the last time we used it.

I'm sure that feeb is not going to change her mind, so we would be only serving to annoy if we continued to try to persuade her!

As a general comment, I've seen a few times photographers change systems, or even cameras, because they felt they were missing something. Whether they found it or not was part of their learning curve I guess.

I hope feeb that you find what you are looking for in the Nikon system. I am sure that you are right to choose that system as your alternative to Pentax, rather than the other alternatives.

Good luck!

I used Concrete5 for my website redesign - life is too busy to even think about all that messing with Dreamweaver.....