The 16-45 will give you that 24mm wide angle that you miss, and it is an excellent lens. Very sharp, with well controlled chromatic abberation (not totally eliminated, but pretty good).

The 12-24mm will go as wide as most of us will ever need, and a lot wider than most of us has lenses for 35mm format for anyway.

Moved to lenses as per your original intention!

The answers will be no and yes repectively. There is no problem getting excellent enlargements from the Pentax DSLRs, as long as the technique is good.

The trouble with backpacks is they are very slow to access the equipment. You stop, take off the pack, undo it, get the kit out, and so on.

I now always use shoulder bags worn across the chest so they don't slip off the shoulder, and always use rapid access designs like the Billingham Alice and Hadley. If I need more euipment I wear two bags, one each side, but it is raely necessary.

In addition, one bag is not enough. The size of bag is geared towards the smallest possible for the purpose. Only necessary items are acrried for any particular purpose. The lighter the load, the more inclined I feel to walk further and the better the results will be.

When you disconnect something from the PC, I think if you right click its icon in the tray bottom right of the screen you will get the option to stop the device, after which Windows will tell you it is now safe to disconnect it. Perhaps these cameras are sensitive to being disconnected without this procedure being followed. It shouldn't be necessary with a USB device, but who knows...

Thinking laterally, it is much easier and more reliable to use a card reader instead of attaching the camera. They are very low cost and will avoid all the connection problems that seem to occur.

Hope that helps!

It's been raining here too, but it does freshen everywhere up ready for some good photography tomorrow. I hope...

They are quite big and heavy compared to modern zooms, but they are good performers.

If the ME Super is in superb condition then it could sell for a reasonable price on eBay. The P30 might not sell at all.

I would keep the one in best condition, but in practice you might never use it, ever.

We only use film cameras for specific purposes now, usually to take slides or to do more Images of England pictures for English Heritage. Everything else is digital.

Why not keep them both for a while to see how it goes?

I have used the Nikon Coolscan IV to scan BW negs, and the first essential step was to turn off the Digital Ice. It seemed to be reading the structure of the film surface and was deleting huge areas as "dust". It is easy to spot the image in Photoshop, so dust reduction is not totally necessary. So try turning off whatever dust and screatch removal is used, and you might get a better result.

Other than that, you can adjust levels and curves in scanner software, and that might be helpful.

The alternative is to put the negative on a lightbox, turn off all the room lights and use a digital camera to make a direct copy. This works amazingly well, although it is much easier with larger negatives.

The UV filter only filters UV light, has no effect on exposure and is used to protect the lens and to reduce the blue cast at high altitudes. It also cuts through haze to some extent.

The Skylight 1A filters more strongly, and ever so slightly warms the pciture.

The Skylight 1B is stronger still and might just need a whisker more exposure.

The 81A filter definitely warms the picture and needs some extra exposure, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 a stop. Then there are 81B, 81C, etc. filters.
These filters warm up cloudy days, remove blue casts in shadows, and indeed are sometimes called "Cloudy" filters.

Hope that helps a bit, although it is not as technically precise as your fugures!