I've just finished my stint filling out questionnaires for Amateur Photographer and the thank you "goody bag" has dropped through the door, which was nice.

One item was a copy of "What Digital SLR?" and they have a very good review of the Km in there. The whole magazine seems very even handed and even the articles show a variety of lenses as examples, including Pentax, Samsung, Olympus and Sony as well as Canon and Nikon. Given that you have to show something it's a very unbiased effort throughout.

Here's a quote from the Km review: "Autofocus is as good as any of its peers, and focus is mostly accurate too."

The latest AP arrived today as well, and already there are signs that things are changing. Along with other things I have seen on the Web it looks to me as though Damien Demolder has taken on board the accusations of bias and actually tried to do something to redress that.

I hope they keep it up and we can take some comfort from knowing that things can change.

Most marques will label a prime Macro lens correctly and usually that sort of lens will be purchased by someone who knows what they are buying - after all, they are not cheap.

Pentax over the years have tended to use correct descriptions. This even extends to the aperture displays in the viewfinder which have always been correctly labelled as, for example, f6.3 or other half stops. Canon have been the annoying ones as some of their displays would create a non-standard "half" setting between f stops. Sloppy design I think on their part.

I think you would have been better with a lens with an "A" on the aperture ring and then it would have saved some of the messing.

For a flower shot like this, if you set Av on the camera and an aperture of around f8 or f11 then the camera will set the shutter speed. A tripod will make accurate focusing easier, and here AF would be fine. The you should get sharp colourful shots almost every time.

Try this with the 18-55mm lens if you have one and it will be much easier. It focuses closer than the 50mm and I wonder if you are actually trying to get in too close and the lens is just not able to focus at those distances.

It's been tried, and full marks to Vivitar in the 1970s for trying to label their lenses correctly. Unfortunately, no-one took this up and independents in particular use the term macro as a marketing device.

Pentax also started labelling zooms with a macro setting, which is not really macro either.

The battle was lost many years ago and now there is a less than zero possibility of anything being labelled with its original and correct meaning.

With the exception of the proper Macro lenses, which as far as the Pentax primes go, are labelled as such.

That depends on whether you are talking to a Prefessional Photographer or an Amateur Photographer.

In the latter case £1500 might be all there is to spend, or even less.

Is the small slider switch on the card in the "lock" position?

If you sharpen too much you will get artifacts and the image will look dreadful.

Moderation in all things will give the results you need. Over-sharpening is definitely to be avoided.

The standard resampling in Photoshop is Bicubic, which is fine, but from CS2 onwards there ia a further choice.

Bicubic Smoother is used for upsizing and Bicubic Sharper is used for downsizing, such as preparing an image for Web use. This will help retain sharpness and detail.

The first example is a straight like-for-like comparison, but the secind is a bit odd IMHO. Two totally different sets of lenses can't have a meaningful price comparison surely?

You've also chosen in that second example the most expensive pentax route, and it's not necessary to do that. What about the very fine 16-45mm?

A bit of a "tweak" to that info, in that Macro lenses are either 1:2 (SMC Pentax-M 100mm f4 is an example) or. more properly, 1:1 (Smc Pentax-FA 100mm f2.8 is an example).

Zooms often go to 1:4 which is not bad, and some approach 1:3, but these are not true macro lenses. They do not have close enough focus and also do not have a flat field, so pictures of say a page from a book may be in focus at the centre but out at the edges, or vice-versa.

To complicate things, Nikon call their macro lenses micro lenses, which is also technically wrong....

With zooms, macro is incorrectly used to mean close focusing.