On a metal finish, that is undeniably true. Black finishes wear on corners and edges. However, silve finishes end up "scuffed" anyway, so that gleaming newness is only preserved by very careful and considerate use.

Black isn't better, but personally I find it more aesthetically pleasing when mounted on a black camera body.

In ancient times black versions of SLRs were highly regarded and more expensive than the normal silver ones.

To answer the lens part of the question - buy the 50-200mm Pentax/Schneider lens with confidence. It's far, far better than its price suggests.

You are making a lot of assumptions there....

Your technique will be more of an issue with macro sharpness than the lens. Either the 50mm or 100mm Pentax macro lenses will be as good as you are likely to get, and you won't see a difference between them. The 100mm version is probably more versatile.

The quest for sharpness is fine, but there are other lens properties that are equally impoirtant such as chromatic abberation, resolution, bokeh, etc.

Fortunately with digital photography, sharpness is unlikely to be a problem.

I don't know about the legal aspects, but I would write to the people who published, point out the infringement and send them a suitable invoice for the useage.

How they responded would dictate the next move.

Don't forget Kodachrome uses very specific processing, only provided via Kodak in Europe. I have a feeling it is now all sent to the USA via Switzerland.

You'll need to ask Kodak if they offer such a service.

If you want to scan your own Kodachrome slides you'll find the structure of the film is different to E6 films. Our Nikon Coolscan IV has a dedicated Kodachrome setting. If your scanner doesn't you may find the results are disappointing. It's not the best film for scanning.

So far I have identified eyecups Fm and Fp, the latter presumably having the cut out. The fitting size should be the same as the eyepiece cap M is still the same.

This is something that constantly annoys me about testers - their conclusions are not supported by the results they present.

If you look closely at each branch, it is surrounded by a clear area. This sort of artifact on edges usually indicated too much sharpening. Don't forget that sharpening is only an enhancement of edge contrast which deludes us into thinking that images are sharper. If it goes too far you get haloes.