Lowest price in today's issue was £698.99 with the 18-55mm lens. There was also a Pentax advertisment for it as well.

In the long term, the Pentax version will retain its second hand value better, so the £250 saving may be reduced in the overall life of the product.

But you basically "pays your money and takes your choice" and your logic is fine.

It can have a real effect when selling. Certainly if you bought a Spotmatic with a SMC Takumat 105mm f2.8 it would be much more interesting than if it had a Soligor 105mm f2.8 Preset lens.

However, if you are interested in using rather than selling the Samsung GX 1L with 18-55 and 50-200 lenses at £399 looks pretty exciting.

I'm not sure from that - the negs look under-exposed, but whether that is from exposure or under-development is hard to tell without handling the originals.

I don't know where you are, but if you have a local Photo Society thery should have at least one member who could tell you what you need to know. Why not contact them?

It's impossible to draw any conclusions from prints, we really need to see the negatives. It is true that pictures with lots of sky can lead to under-exposure with centre weighted metering systems, but I presume you metered off the ground and used that reading?

Can you show an actual negative and make it an accurate as possible representation?

My first darkroom was in the attic. Water was carried up and down in black buckets. It was fantastic.

My current darkroom can be walked into, but water still has to be carried in and out in black buckets. It is fantastic.

However, it has also not been used for the past 2 years as all my photography has been digital, including scanning and printing from negatives.

The pleasure of being isolated for hours under that red light has been replaced by a different sort of pleasure at the PC. It must be said that I now prefer digital imaging and only use film for transparencies.

Time moves on.

That dark band is the first bit of film that has been totally exposed to light and therefore should be as black as is possible. If it isn't black, then severe under-development looks likely.

There is really no substitute for deveopling your own black and white films. It's not difficult, you just need to be methodical and consistent, but the reward will be that you will be able to get negatives just how you like them and with the characteristics that you want.

You and I both like Tri-X. I process it in FX-39 and get the crisp results that I like. You might prefer it in some other developer, and it's a shame to leave it to the lab's random choice.

As regards T-Max, it is a very different beast to Tri-X. Tri-X is a conventional high-silver film with coarse but crisp grain structure and hence plenty of "bite". T-Max 100 is a T-Grain modern emulsion of quite different characteristics, and perhaps you just don't like it as much.

So my suggestion is that you do the processing yourself and I'm sure that after some practice you will be much better than the lab.

Talking of focusing lenses, it's also vital that the eyepiece correction is suitable for your eyesight. As photographers get older it's more and more difficult to focus using the standard eyepiece with a -1 dioptre value such as found on most earlier Pentax cameras.

Some photographers might find it easier to use their reading glasses, or maybe to fit an eyepiece correction lens M. Later cameras have dioptre adjustment built in, which is much better.

It is generally accepted that a brighter viewfinder image is easier to focus, but it's not always the case. Some users report difficulty when using the Beattie type screens which, although undeniably brighter, seem to make the point of focus less easy to judge. This may mean that the granularity of the screen is also a factor.