Nobody is buying cars, that's the problem.

There are plenty of people wanting to buy cameras and lenses. If we all bought the Pentax stuff we wanted, wouldn't SRS do well?

It begs the question of whether we would prefer Pentax to spend their R&D money on esoteric lenses that few will buy, or on superb lenses that are practical and within our budget.

I don't need an f/1 lens, or even an f/1.2 for that matter.

All electrical circuits generate random electrical impulses as well as the signal proper. You can hear it from a loudspeaker as hiss. You see it in an image as noise.

The difference in level between the background noise and the required signal is the "signal to noise ratio". In an image, this background noise appears mainly in shadows, where the signal level (dark tones) is not much above the noise level.

24mm f2.8 - 84 degrees
28mm f3.5 - 75
50mm f1.7 - 47
135mm f3.5 - 18

That's fine ken, but can you be a bit more specific as to why?

Indeed so, the requirements of many photographers have changed. If the objective is images for a monitor screen and the web, then we don't need many MP to satisfy that. And we probably don't need full frame...

Publication is as demanding as printing I think. Those aspiring to publication will want a DSLR, although some other camera types can provide the quality for some images.

I do tend to make A3 prints quite a bit, for competitions and exhibitions, and I was quite pleased, no, very pleased when my print of Ripon Cathedral won the competition at the Wigan 10 Gala Day of Photography recently. You need high quality cameras to produce high quality detailed prints.

It was interesting that the digital print was really better than most film based prints would be. Sharp edges suit digital images of architectural subjects.

There is actually a chain of logic that means that the 35mm format on film produces just the right amount of resolution to make a 16" x 12" print that has about 4 lpmm on the print. That might not sound a lot but it coincides almost excactly with the ability of the human eye to perceive detail on such a print. More resolution is wasted because we can't discern the difference.

To achieve this print resolution we need the sort of resolution that a good 35mm format lens will provide. So in a sense 35mm format on film is ideal.

Of course like most things digital throws a lot of this logic out of the window, so to speak. Our standards now involve huge magnifications as we zoom in on our monitor screens and probably we are much more critical. Much of this though is still wasted when we make a print. 300ppi is about our limit and more than that will only make for bigger file sizes.

I know quite a few people with Pentax DSLRs, apart from those on this forum, and none of them have failed so far.

The only fault I've ever been told of face to face by someone was with earlt samples of the *istD which had a counter reading error. It could be lived with though.

If a full screen display was 1024x768 don't forget that will include all the headers and adverts and everything else. The image size in the forum has to be less than that if we want to avoid having to scroll to see all the page.

800 pixels wide will mean we can see all the image in one go, plus the message and it won't all be disappearing off the side of the screen.

There's nothing abstract about the pictures, we can see what they are quite clearly.

Abstract implies getting an idea across or a feeling from an image that suggests the subject matter, but is not the subject matter. Swirls of cream in a coffee cup that looked like birds flying could be abstract. Patterns that suggest anger, fear or other emotions could be abstract.

So no, not abstract enough to be abstract.