The singular has always been lens and the plural has always been lenses.

The use of lense seems to be a new thing on internet forums. Whether or not it is an American spelling is something else, but all the US magazines I have ever seen use lens as the spelling.

And since the previous post has been deleted by its author, this post of mine no longer makes sense. Ah well.

True, but alkaline batteries may not have the capacity to run your camera properly. As far as I recall it is for this reason that Pentax don't recommend them.

Very nice textures but maybe you're not completely happy because the image consists of two entirely different halves that could really be separate images altogether.

There's always a coupon at the back of the magazine for you to send in with your entries on CD, slide or print. Nothing has changed in this respect and the new methods offered here are extra to the coventional ways to enter.

Let's take an example of 50mm lenses. The f1.2 is superb in low light and controls point light sources very well as befits its purpose. At f8 it is just about indistinguishable from the f1.4, f1.7 or f2 versions.

But as a lens it is less suitable for images of flat subjects because it does not have the same flatness of field as the f1.7 and f2 lenses.

So although all are great at at f8 for distant subjects the lenses behave very differently when specialised work is undertaken and they all have their own design parameters.

So it depends how you define "better" and that depends on what you are going to use the lens for.

Any good branded card. They are cheap enough these days not to be tempted by ultra-cheap ones of unknown reliability.

I would use more smaller cards, say 1 or 2GB, rather than one large capacity card. The logic of this is that if a card does fail then fewer images are lost in one go. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Again it depends on what you are photographing. For architecture it's fine but if you have lots of fine tree branches against bright sky then you will indeed see purple fringing, especially at the edges.

The pity with all lenses is that manufacturers don't give a breakdown of what the design parameters are for a given lens. Obviously the Sigma would not be first choice for an architect. If this were explained upfront, then it would avoid disappointment and wasted cash. This applies equally well to all lenses from all manufactureres - tell us what they are designed for and then we can make an informed choice.

Likewise a statement, for example like "Both 100mm and 50mm macros are superb, sharp lenses, but the 50mm is more suited to the photography of flat subjkects such as documents" (if it were true, I'm not saying it is so!) would be a useful indication in addition to providing distortion figures.

I have a superb loose leaf folder from the Spotmatic era that does just this, including distortion diagrams for all the lenses then available. Very useful stuff, and certainly very interesting.

The Pentax 12-24mm is just about perfect as far as distortion goes. It depends what you photograph, but I'd be very unhappy with all that barrel distortion in the Sigma 10-20mm.

It will be interesting to see how the Tokina 11-16mm behaves in this respect.

I wouldn't keep a lens that wasn't becoming sharp till f11 though.

Not better than the Tokina 28-80mm do you mean? If so, these are two very different sorts of lenses and not really comparable directly.

Lens testing is a very precise art that takes a considerable amount of effort to produce meaningful results. Apart obviously from being able to spot reals "duds" straight away!

I tend to find them a bit severe on the eyes, but also my view is based on seeing lots of monitors in offices and really not many in an imaging context.

Laptops tend not to be that great.

I'll have a proper look around soon and save myself a bit of desk space at the same time.