The new lenses with built in ultrasonic motors will be whisper-quiet compared to the ones driven by a motor in the camera body. They should also focus quicker. That's progress.

Pentax aren't charging a premium for something free with Nikon - the 16-50mm is a pro-spec top of the range lens and comparable Nikon lenses cost the same or more.

The 16-45mm is as good and considerably less expensive if you don't need the f2.8 aperture, SDM focusing and the bulk that goes with such a lens.

I really doubt that. A Leica rangefinder of a Pentax ME Super say - no contest in ease of use, and it's not the rangefinder that wins.

Rangefinders are a bit of a lost art these days and many people find it very difficult to get to grips with matching the images in the viewfinder.

You can't hotlink from the gallery.

Even when corrected the link doesn't work - try Photobucket, which works without any problem.

Lots of old cameras are exciting bits of engineering, some are beautiful indeed.

The Pen series of half frame cameras have a following of their own and a Society for users to join. A friend of mine has several if not all of the range and they are nice.

The trouble was that the SLRs were not particularly smaller than a Pentax MX, so why suffer the quality drop of having a negative half the size?

Also, 72 shots to a roll of film was too many for most people and shooting transparencies (once very popular) meant extra charges for mounting.

Just think instead of a roll of film that contained Christmas, Easter, Holiday and Christmas again the casual shooter could have a roll that covered two years! Oh how times have changed....

We always buy the kit lens with a new body. We either keep it or onto eBay it goes, where it will raise more cash than it cost.

It's rather amusing that the first shot of the baseball player "to select the moment when the bat hits the ball" has been shot from an angle that has a huge pole stuck out of his head.

Which goes to show that 60fps a good photographer does not make.

You actually need skill, timing and one good shot. That would be worth aspiring to.

You are correct.

The original Pentax screw thread was a 42mm diameter screw thread mount. (I'm ignoring a previous very very old mount to avoid complication.) This was introduced with the Pentax camera of 1957, one of the first with a fixed pentaprism finder.

This mount served well, but in 1975 was superceded by the K mount, a faster to use bayonet mount of 45mm diameter. This increased diameter made possible new and exciting lens designs such as the 50mm f1.2. It is still used today, albeit with the addition of all the electronic contacts.

This means that all Pentax K bayonet lenses are useable on all Pentax K bayonet bodies. There are exceptions to this, and qualifications. For example, newer lenses may be for digital only (reduced image circle would cause vignetting on film bodies) and lenses with no aperture ring need a body that can control the aperture. Even so, almost everything can be used, with limitations in some cases.

The screw thread lenses can also be used, via the Pentax Adapter K, in Av and M modes only.

That's the simple version of the tale, and if you search the forum or ask a specific question then any exceptions that may be relevant to you can be revealed!

Great idea, well exectuted. I wonder if you could ditch the car in this though, and perhaps the car in the background as well.

I like the toning very much.

I totally agree with what your comment implies George, and it's one of the things that does irritate me. That is, when the headlines don't really reflect what the main text is saying. They are just there to grab attention and they aren't well thought out. I suspect it may be a sub-editor somewhere who does that and they just go for the catchy line.

I'm not even sure I like the "prosumer" tag in this respect - I would put cameras like the X70 more in that bracket. DSLRs are for "professional" use, in the sense of proficient amateurs and professionals. The latter are sometime proficient too!

The same is often true of MTF graphs. The conclusions are often not borne out by the graphs, or maybe sometimes the text doesn't really get borne out by the supporting images.

It's all a bit sloppy really.