Probably best to wait and see what the street price ends up at. Everything so far has been speculation.

There are two types of membership.

Standard membership is free and the size limit is no more than 600 pixels on the longest side, file size under 100K, if I remeber correctly!

e2 membership costs £29 per year and you can post bigger pictures, 1000 pixels wide, up to 400K file size, but as near to 200K as possible is preferred.

Let us know your user name and we'll have a look!

The old Pentax finishes were really high grade. The only manufacturer with a better finish that I've seen is Voigtlander, who made a fantastic job on their Bessamatic of 1959.

I'm very hopeful that the new finish will be just as good if not better, as technology will no doubt have moved on.

I'll sell you one for £2000 if you like, thoroughly checked with 1200 or so test exposures!

Thanks for the info Shim.

Happy to say I have tried them and I certainly would not use them in preference to Pentax lenses. However, like many manufacturers, they would have been capable of making things to whatever specification was required for the perceived market or for the manufacturer who was going to label them.

Cosina are living proof of this sort of multi-level ability.

If you missed it you're not the only one, so did I.

This is a very classical style of black and white photography that would not have been out of place at any time over the past century. Timeless.

I think it could be better, with just a couple of thoughts as to how. A difficulty with the scene is that the main subject is darker than the background and blocks our view of the lighter areas. Lighter areas catch our eye, so our eye goes to the background on the left.

The light is coming from the right and illumnating that building, so at this time of day I would be wanting to move around and photograph the light building against that wonderful sky.

If you want the statue, then either light it with flash to get some detail into it or choose a different time of day when it has some light falling on it.

Now those suggestions may or may not give you the style of photograph you want, if so please disagree, but there are some general principles there which I hope might assist.

When I was working in another field baked on powder coated finishes were widely used in very arduous sutuations. They were very very hardwearing under conditions much worse than even the heaviest conceivable use a camera could be put to.

There would be some kudos for producing a 50mm f1 that was actually available and i guess that some of the richer Pentax Users might well buy one.

Isn't the Leica one around £7000.00?