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The 18-135mm or 18-270mm will do you good service. If wet climes, then the former for its WR, if a dry area then the latter will cover just about any eventuality in one lens.

You're not intended to put lens caps on a dedicated hood Algi, I'm not sure why you would want to.

Some people store hoods reversed on a lens, but as I've said before I'm not a big fan of this approach. It makes the lens diameter much larger when putting the camera in a case and tempts us to use the lens as is with hood reversed, which isn't doing anything to reduce flare.

My last comment on this was made whilst away, so I didn't have access to what my small scanner is. It's a Summit PhotoFix SPS, which is the one with the built in LCD screen. Simple and effective and quick to use. One added bonus is that it will also scan 110 slides and negatives. I've seen these on offer for as little as £50 under various names.

I also have a Nikon Coolscan V and that's much more time consuming to use properly, but better quality of course.

Not the best place to carry a camera - we know prams do that from time to time!

Off to JPS for a repair quote I think.

The only other thought is insurance? Get a claim in quickly if you're covered.

Lens hoods were available as optional extras, so only a handful of people would buy the dedicated marque hoods. Most bought Hoya and similar third party hoods.

However, the Pentax hoods generally were clip on and much faster to employ, so as time went by I ended up buying the specific hood for a lens. There are plenty of them about and the 50mm hood is still available today. I wonder if it's the longest lasting item in the Pentax catalogue?

Can we pull this thread back to User feedback on the K-S2 please.

Horst, are you sure you want to put your address on the internet like that?

Many thanks for updating, as always it's appreciated!

On the Q and Q10 it's equivalent to 82.5 - 247.5mm

On the Q7 and Q-S1 it's more like 75 - 225mm

I must try it with the 150-450mm lens sometime!

In days of yore, some German manufacturers moved their plants to other locations, such as Rollei moving production to Singapore. There did seem to be a lower performance from the Singapore products, but manufacturing wasn't perhaps as precise then as it is now.

It would be interesting to do a test on Japanese and Vietnamese Limited lenses. No doubt Pentax already know the answer, but they are unlikely to tell us. It would be interesting if the Vietnam products turned out to be better - why do we assume that the Japanese ones would have the edge? I suspect quality control in Vietnam is every bit as keen as in Japan.