My preference for dealing with the card reader is to simply copy the card into a folder on the PC. The folders are called SD1, SD2, SD3, etc. All you need to do is open My Documnets and My Computer and simply "drag and drop" the folder on the card into the appropriate folder on the PC. This does not delete the contents of the card.

When I have burned a back-up CD, also called SD1, SD2, etc., then the card is formatted for further use.

Actually it's not just sentiment. The Pentax 12-24mm is the same optically as the Tokina, which, according to reviews, is an outstanding design. However, add the SMC coating and the ergonomics of the Pentax design ethos and I feel that there is a justification for paying a premium price. The best I've found at the moment is just over £400, so a purchase is now looking imminent.

There are differences of opinion regarding the 18-55mm. I would summarise the lens as slightly soft wide open but of excellent quality stopped down. We have two of them, and they both deliver excellent results.

The other two lenses mentioned are of the lower price brackets, but I have no experience of either of them.

No doubt in my mind. Save a little longer and get the Pentax. Or dust off the credit card....

I know there is some disagreement over this generally, and I also know that the definition of the circle of confusion can be changed, and so the difinition of DOF will change.

Bur look at it this way. If we have a standard lens on a large format, medium format and 35mm camera all showing the same image, then there will be more DOF the smaller the format gets. This is because a 50mm lens behaves like a 50mm lens, has more DOF than a 80mm, etc.

So at the smallest extreme, a Minox uses a 15mm lens and has so much DOF nothing is out of focus.

In each of these cases the circle of confusion will be defined differently, but that isn't an issue.

The digital format is smaller than 35mm, so fitting its standard lens (a 31mm?) into the scheme of things, this will have more DOF than the 35mm camera standard lens. It can't be any other way. And we know that small digital compacts with tiny format sensors and very short focal length lenses get just about everything in focus, which fits very well into this argument IMHO.

However, the question was about macro. Let's stick to 35mm and as long as the image is kept to the same magnification, the DOF with a 50mm or 100mm macro will be the same, as long as the 100mm is moved further away from the subject to get the same field of view.

Now the sensor or the film won't directly affect DOF, or we would be arguing that a 25 ISO film had more or less DOF than a 400 ISO one. That can't be true, so the sensor resolution equally shouldn't be a factor.

I've seen this written both ways round in magazines and text books, so lots of people are confused, but I'll stick to the above and invite being corrected!

The DOF stays the same providing the magnification stays the same, but the lens will have to be moved further away to get all the subject in. That holds true for using, say, either a 50mm or changing to a 100mm macro.

When you use the 100mm on a DSLR you also gain DOF because of the smaller sensor size (format) and it's too early to think about that!

Fair enough, George, but a Kodak Ektra II would be rather nice to have...

There was a time when Kodak did actually make some very desireable cameras!

You can still get glass plates to special order, so it may be a while before film disappears....

In theory, a greater viewing distance will indeed mean you could use a lower pixels/inch setting (not to be confused with the dots/inch values of the printer) but people have a tendency to peer closely at even A3 prints, so I still use 300ppi. There's really no reason not to - it's the computer that's doing the work!

I think there can be a lot of confusion about this, and certainly I regularly go over these issues in the Digital Nights that I run at ADAPS.

This is what I recommend:

1) Create the image size in Photoshop. Select A3, select 300 pixels/inch, select bicubic resampling and let PS do its work.

2) Set the printer perameters. On my Epson, this means 2880 dots per inch, correct size of paper, correct paper profile (Photo Quality Glossy Film) and a -7 reduction on magenta. Always the same paper, always the same finish. The parameters are saved as a Custom Setting "Photo Printing" just as my black and white setting is saved as "Monochrome".

Now that's the essence of it, but I also do relatively little work on an image, preferring to make the original in-camera JPEG as good as possible from the start. That also includes proper exposure in camera, and I really haven'y felt any urgent need to use RAW.

After I have copied the card to the hard drive, as soon as any file is opened and worked on it is always saved a a TIFF. My golden rule is never save as a JPEG, as you are introducing compression and artifacts at a stage where it is unecessary.

Why not think of it as a superb opportunity to re-think the lens line-up completely?

The digital body will need especially some careful consideration regarding wide angles. Perhaps the new 12-24mm will fill the gap, or maybe the 14mm and the 16-45mm.

Whichever way, there are some exciting new lens designs to try out.