That DS is being currently discussed on the AP forum, well mentioned anyway. It's not going away it seems!

I felt that after the Super A series the camera drifted from the Pentax philosophy.

The MZ5 and MZ3 models firmly returned to the path.

From all accounts you will get a better lens, one designed for digital and from a line up of superior quality.

The 28mm f2.8 design is not regarded as one of the best Pentax lenses ever.

However, "sharper" is not the only thing to look for in a lens. Sharpness, resolution, contrast, drawing, field flatness, chromatic abberation, resistance to flare, bokeh.....all are part of the picture as well. Overall I would expect the limited digital lenses to possess a better balance of properties for your K10D.

It looks like you have your plan then. The 21/40/70 set is a nice choice if you like primes and they are all excellent quality and very compact.

How can you go wrong?

There's a bit of a contradiction here as the lenses mentioned are quite different. The 28mm becomes a slightly wide standard lens on a DSLR and the 40mm becomes a slight telephoto. These are different things and don't have interchangeable function.

The 21mm becomes a rather wide standard lens or a very mild wide angle, depending on your taste, but is a different beast again.

I think the decision depends on what sort of images you are hoping to capture. If you wanted a multi purpose everyday catch-all lens then the 18-55mm kit lens would be a better choice. The K10D is hardly light and compact to begin with, again depending on your point of view and what you compare it with, so a compact lens is not going to make it pocketable.

There are many reasons for using Pentax, but I don't rate nostalgia very highly amongst them. What I do rate highly is quality, elegance of design, good ergonomics and good compatibility. Pentax has these qualities.

The Pentax era that I didn't subscribe to was that between the end of the Super A series and the beginning of the MZ series. Between those excellent models there was a time when I found the products over-large and clunky.

Now the range has developed in a direction I like very much and it is catching on. However, I can also tell you that I have used the alternatives as well. The Nikons would be my second choice but the design details on the lenses and some of the functions I find a bit iffy. The Canons I never have liked. The Fuji DSLRs are not bad, count them as Nikons. The Olympus and other 4/3 system cameras have too small a sensor and I have little confidence that in the long term they will stick with it (where are the OM series now?)

So you might think the Pentax choice is nostalgic, but it is possible that it is a sound, logical decision.

I'm not sure that helps at all. After all, the price on eBay also depends upon the condition of the item as well as the current mood of the buyers and the attractiveness of the listing.

Would you not be better to just put an asking price like in any advert - people will make offers if they want to.

I don't think you're strange at all. What you are saying is very sensible!

Cameras have been sophisticated enough for years and after all there's only a limited amount that we can change when taking a photograph. The shutter speed and aperture. We can do that with very little sophistication, after which all the added bits and bobs are nice but not essential.

Nicely explained, but just a tweak perhaps to the issue of DOF. A 500mm lens, to take your example, will indeed have the same DOF as any other 500mm lens, but on digital now it is much longer, in effect a field of view of 750mm. This means a super-telephoto will the DOF of a slightly less telephoto, which leads us to smaller format = more DOF, for a given field of view.

This could get very complicated, but I'll just mention that for a given magnification then all lenses at a given aperture will have the same DOF. You can get rounf this idea with a simple macro lens example, with a subject at say 1:1 magnification. If a 50mm macro is say 5 inches away, then to get the same image with a 100mm macro it will need to be 10 inches away. The DOF will be the same for both. However, as we have moved our viewpoint the perspective will be different.

I hope that helps and doesn't confuse...

Pentax lenses are amongst the best available, anywhere.

The first thing I've noticed when handling other marques, apart from a cruder design ethos, is that the viewfinders are pathetic.

Pentax viewfinders are a lesson to all manufacturers.