This may horrify you, but in Victorian times when people painted more, I can tell you that the well off would buy a painting, maybe a Gainsborough, reframe it, cut it down and maybe even repaint parts of it to suit them better.

If you want to read this for yourseves, I refer you to the Letters of Edward FitzGerald, which contain many such instances.

Even at Leica prices you get faulty units, and Leica have had plenty of digital problems.

For the number of units sold, Pentax are not really out of step with any of the other marques.

The thing to do is get the replacement and then enjoy it.

Your Photos is the place to put your photos!

My feeling is that I like the background very much and an image with the cottage and its surroundings would be very atmospheric.

I'm less keen on the foreground as it is largely in shadow, and forms a complete second subject in itself. An image usually works best if there is only one subject.

It's seen perhaps as a cheap way to get some images, but the only answer is not to enter.

Don't give away your material for nothing.

I put it into Photoshop and with the brightness increased substantially it becomes visible at 100% and above. But it is definitely there and, as you say Chirpy, it's about 1 pixel wide.

That's very disappointing for you, so I hope you get your replacement soon.

There's nothing at all showing up as a green stripe on my monitor though - where is it? Is my monitor too dark to see it?

Sorry about the delay getting back to you Stefan, but things have been a bit busy.

I think there are two ways to approach this, the everyday practical way and the scientific theoretical way.

I would suggest the latter is outside the scope of this forum for most readers, so I'd refer you to a text on optics and the one I have in front of me now is Fundamentals of Optics by Jenkins & White (McGraw Hill). The laws of optics have not changed, so the age of a book, within reason, doesn't matter so much. It is very heavy going though.

In a practical sense there are quite a few excellent books on Photographic lenses (not quite the same thing) and I have two that I quite like for general knowledge:
The Lens Book by Roger Hicks & Francis Schultz (ISBN 0 7153 0149 7)
and The Complete Book of Photographic Lenses by Joseph Meehan (ISBN 0-8174-3697-9)
Both of these are very palatable and give the information needed in an accessible way.

Wikpedia does have some good articles, although not all the information is correct, but it's worth a look. For example, the article mentioned by George on teleconverters is not bad, but does say some slightly contentious things that are approximations of the truth. That may be OK depending on the reader's requirements.

In fact, as in many things, the more you know the more you find there is to know, so we all learn all the time. If I think of a better way to describe what I have been trying to put across, I'll come back to it again.

Hope that helps!

Testing different cameras meaningfully is fraught with problems.

What is more interesting is the difference in approach that a group of photographers, using all the marques, will have when in the same situation.

We had a recent example recently when ADAPS went to Victoria Baths in Manchester, with something like 30 photographers and four models all happily lost somewhere in the vast complex.

We all did something different and all had our own ways of seeing the subject. Any of us could have used any of the cameras, it didn't matter. What did matter was the rich subject matter.

Very inspiring and it would be quite a good Pentax User meet perhaps.

This is an old one that keeps cropping up.

The Pentax and Samsung batteries are the same, just as the cameras are the same.

We have two K20D cameras and a total of 6 Pentax batteries -= I would not use an unknown source cheap battery.

There are plenty of people on here who use alternatives though, and so far no one has reported a disaster.

Don't start again guys.

I understand that people want to explain themselves, but in the end sometimes it is much better to say nothing or the bare minimum needed to place an apology, if that is what is intended.