I love places like this and you've captured a nice wide selection of images. Is it a large site or a fairly compact one?

The dedicated lens hoods are tailored to each lens and offer the best protection, and yes, always use a hood. Your pictures also show why I ditched routinely using filters a long time ago.

Modern coatings are superb, but lenses have many more elements, so there's still potentially a fair bit of scattered light around.

Results are now posted, congratulations to all the winners and many thanks for all the fine entries.

Manufacturers used to claim that as long as the vibration came after the shutter closed then that was fine. The MX had no mirror lock up, claiming the shutter was so smooth it wasn't needed. Ironically, our current cameras seem smoother, but do have mirror lock up available.

Excellent, good, clean, precise shots with loads of impact.

Is there no charger supplied with the camera? It does seem to increasingly be the case.

You could try eBay and there are suppliers there of genuine chargers at lower prices.

Some cheap chargers may not have overcharge protection or sensor ability to know when the battery is optimally charged. Unfortunately there's no reliable way of knowing which ones are good or bad.

I presume you've tried restarting the computer and all the things that we would normally do?

Probably the best way to transfer images is to use a card reader rather than connecting the camera directly. If all else fails, then I'd suggest taking this route. Card readers are inexpensive and efficient.

Hope that helps!

It's also a matter of bulk and adding a viewfinder makes for a larger camera. I personally also quite dislike direct vision viewfinders, which is why I changed from them in the 1970s and took up the SLR design.

With direct vision, using a telephoto lens means a dreadfully small viewfinder crop and it's IMHO pretty useless. I am aware that there are hybrid viewfinders, but there are some lens limitations to their use as well.

The MX-1 also has an articulated screen, which was badly wanted by some at the time, but this too adds bulk. It is sometimes useful, but overall I think I'd prefer a smaller camera.

I think it just proves that different people have different requirements and no choices are right or wrong per se.

None of them are really, but by cupping a hand round the screen it can be dimly seen, just enough to actually take a shot.

Not ideal, but as soon as the light dims then it gets much better.

Talking of colours, I read earlier that the custom colours on the Q7 were now discontinued in the USA, no doubt signalling the end of the production run.

It's a shame, I had my colour scheme all worked out: Olive Green/Brown or Metal Green/Black both looked very good to me.

Mind you, the Gold Q2 idea is also sound....