If you have had it less than 28 days and you act quickly, you should be able to get a replacement/refund from your supplier. The S5i is a very nice little camera, so a replacement should hpefully be fine.

I understand MX production started out at 15,000 units per month, but I guess it increased considerably beyond that.

I think you've got a point.

Pentax do make superb cameras and lenses, but the level of promotion in the UK has, in my opinion, been poor.

Hopefully there are signs that this may be changing, and if it does then the future for pentax could be very good.

I don't know directly how to do that - I'm sure someone will!

What I did want to say was that the information you want is embedded in the image file, along with shutter speed, aperture, colour space and everything else. If you use Photoahop this information, including date and time, is displayed in a box in the File Browser.

If the laws of optics made our heads hurt before, add digital and we must be in migraine territory!

The 18-35 was designed to cover the field of view of the 35mm frame, so the hood must be designed for that. The digital sensor uses only the centre of that view, so we should be able to use a slightly narrower hood without problems. How much narrower is something else...

In reality, most SLR-style digital cameras do not allow easy fitting of hoods, and coating techniques are such that this is rarely a problem. It is, therefore, debateable that with the superb SMC coating we really need to bother too much about the hoods. In any event, they can be so shallow as to be almost useless.

I do use the hoods, but more to keep fingers off the front element than anything else. It's not easy to induce flare in a SMC lens. Using a hood is, IMHO, more of a "belt and braces" thing, and I tend to stand in shadows and so on to protect the lens against flare, as well as using the hood.

The A lens is more useful on modern pentax bodies as it allows automatic aperture setting by the camera. So even the new digital bodies will be totally happy with it. It is a fine 6 element lens of very high quality.

The M lens is a 5 element lens, but the more modest aperture may not need 6 elements, and it is also capable of very high quality results. However, it does not allow auto aperture setting and so is unsuitable for some functions on later bodies.

On balance, I would keep the A lens to use. But you will get so little for the M lens, why not keep it for use on manual focus bodies or as a spare? You could always buy a nice second hand ME Super and use it on that!

Very well put, George, and I think sound thinking and sound advice.

Sue and I now both have *istDS bodies, with the 18-55mm lenses, but lots of other pentax optics, making Pentax the obvious choice for DSLRs for us.

The only other real competition quality-wise IMHO is the Nikon D70, at this price level anyway!

I too had an (early) SMC Pentax-A 50mm f1.7, and the aperture ring became totally unusable. I did open the lens, which is not difficult at all, but the mass of springs, screws and sundry bits and pieces was a total disaster!

I now leave lens repair to the professionals. Having said that, this one lens is the only one that has ever had any sort of problem.

Sort of connected to this, don't forget that if you have a manual focus lens fitted to AF bodies and the body is set to AF then the shutter will only release when the in focus indicator is OK. If you don't want to be limited in this way, set to MF.

This caused one or two people I know quite a bit of puzzlement for a while, it's the simple details that get us foxed!

If it was for a Pentax 67 it would say so on the lens. Also, it wouldn't be a Super-Takumar, I think all the 67 lenses have always been Super Multi Coated. It sounds like a fast 135mm lens for the 35mm screw thread bodies.