There's a lot of speculation and opinion being presented as fact in this thread. There are many things that we cannot know.

What we do know is that the camera business is as tough as any other business, and at the moment is having problems keeping growth going. Sales are actually falling and have been for some time. The cake is smaller, but that does favour the smaller players who have room to increase their share with individualistic approaches.

Pentax is doing what it has done in the past, high quality without falling into small volume niche products. They are still mainstream, but with a distinct ethos and maintaining that high quality approach. There are companies in this field in far worse positions than Pentax.

Yes, Pentax have a good track record, all they needed was investment and they seem to have that now. Not perhaps unlimited funds, but more and enough provided to move forwards in a sustainable manner.

Unfortunately the forum software won't merge threads. This duplication sometimes happens, so I'll close this one and put a link in to the other thread.

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/hd-pentax-d-fa---9733--70-200mm-f2-8-5268...

The most useful thing would be to post an example or two. As nobody has experienced what you are describing it would be very helpful.

Looking at the DA lens booklet, it seems there is a relationship with the size of lens. The case length and width though seem to make allowance for the inclusion of a reversed lens hood.

It's been a tough place to be for a while.

I see the internet is starting to discuss this lens, but I've only found Japanese so far.

The lens mount is set to a particular tension, so maybe it does need re-adjusting. It's the first time I've heard of one needing it though.

First I would clean mount and lens mount with a soft, lint-free dry cloth. Then check that there isn't something blocking a connector, or that a connector isn't sitting proud of its normal position.

Who knows at this point Nigel...but it's worth also bearing in mind that this obsession with resolution is actually a new digital phenomenon. In many ways.

When we used film, very few people actually used a film/developer combination that made full use of the lens resolution. I used 400 ASA Kodak Tri-X in FX-39, a combination that gave very sharp grain, but ultra fine grain it was not. If I wanted the highest resolution I would have needed 16 ASA Kodak Technical Pan film, or maybe for something a little less unforgiving of technique 32 ASA Kodak Panatomic-X, or 50 ASA Ilford Pan-F. All these films were black and white.

For colour, the sharpest and finest grained would have been Kodak Kodachrome 25, a slide film. Colour negative films were not in the same league at this time.

The point I'm making is that to make use of all this we need a solid tripod, the slowest ISO value, the optimum lens aperture and flawless technique throughout. Most of us, me included, rarely shoot in this way, making a lot of it a bit academic.