I think the lowest was £749 body only.

We're just back from a day at the exhibition and the feet feel the usual aggravation that wandering around the NEC for several hours always gives them.

Pentax K20Ds were on offer with the new 18-55mm lens, but also most of the new lenses were there as well, including the 200mm f2.8 and the 300mm f4 and even the 55-300mm.

The Samsung GX20 was also to be found wither on its own or as the two lens kit. I saw the Samsung versions of several of the lenses as well. Interestingly, the 35mm lens was there and its construction was almost identical to the FA 50mm f1.4

Other lenses of interest were the 77mm f1.8 and the DA Limited series and all in all afair bit of Pentax was around.

Canon and Nikon were both there in a big way and other manufacturers included Fuji who were showing the Infra Red versions of their S5 Pro and S9600 cameras. Our friend Paul Jones came along and he will be buying the S5 Pro to replace his ageing S2 Pro.

There were lots of Photo Books again this year, some of them of stunning quality.

Pete Bargh and the team were on the very busy EPZ/Pentax User stand where there was a full programme of talks and events going on.

It was very busy today and we saw quite a few people we knew. We probably saw some PU members as well, but with no faces to go with the names we'll never know...

It's definitely worth a visit and it continues this week until Wednesday.

Thanks, that's a very good point. These sort of lenses are normally used at normal veryday distances, not close up, so that probably explains the discepancy. And probably means their test is meaningless as well.

It's a matter of degree and also of the sort of subject matter undertaken.

In any event I would say a small degree of barrel distortion would be acceptable in an ultra-wide lens. It's what we expect. An ultra-wide with pincushion distortion of any degree would be totally unacceptable though and would be a strange beast indeed.

Thanks for the links.

The Sigma 10-20mm is corrected, i.e. it is not a fisheye, but it is true that it might be considered to have not been corrected very well.

The Pentax 12-24mm in my experience is corrected very well, and this was supported by Geoffrey Crawley's lens test in AP. I use this lens routinely for architecture shots and there is no problem. I can't really comment on Photozone's results - they say what they say so we can take that on board. Other tests seem to have been rather different.

Perhaps that's an argument for using tests as a guidance only but checking things out for ourselves.

The Pentax 10-17mm has a wider angle of view, in fact 180 degrees across the diagonal, but is not corrected for distortion. There were originally scientific applications that required this and indeed other different fisheye projections but for our purposes the effect is a creative one.

The Sigma 10-20mm is corrected for sitortion, but the Pentax 12-24mm is much better in this respect, almost perfect in fact.

The Pentax 12-24mm is an exceptional lens, with very very low distortion making it suitable for architecture shots.

All the missing information is critical and without the details and seeing the items I wouldn't personally want to buy.

£300 sounds way too much as well.

The thing about converters is that they don't alter the minimum focusing distance of the lens, so you get a doubling of magnification.

The downside is the loss of lens speed, but even more so the loss of quality.

I have not yet found a converter that is better than just blowing up the centre of the image instead.

The GX20 and a selection of lenses was on the Samsung stand....