The Vivitar 135mm f/2.3 has a mighty reputation.

The 120mm f/2.8 is designed as a portrait lens - weak performance wide open, sharp when closed down.

The 85mm lenses are the classic portrait lens and Pentax made a few including the 85mm f/2 M and the very expensive 85mm f/1.4

My personal favourite though is the SMC Pentax-M 100mm f/2.8 - compact and beautiful rendering.

Many thanks for the comments Gareth and by all means be blunt!

Don't like this feature, having tried it with a camera that provided no charger unit. We rotate batteries to keep a camera in constant use, so taking it out of use for hours to recharge it is useless. For compacts we rotate two batteries, for DSLRs we rotate three.

Change the sensor, you change the processing too to some extent, but you have an upgraded "film" in your DSLR. The overall effect is subtly different possibly between CCD and CMOS cameras. Not better, not worse, just different.

I think it is very subtle though and I'm only partially convinced.

I'm going to lock this thread now. We already have a pointless thread.

That may well be so, the question really is how that's relevant to what we finally see with our eyes.

That's something everyone has to judge for themselves, I just think it's a pity when I see some beginners sinking under RAW conversion instead of enjoying their photography.

What I'm saying is that I have seen no evidence that the theory has any actual benefit to the end result. My feeling is that the phraseology you are using exaggerates the negative aspects of JPEG shooting and many photographers might actually be happier using JPEG than being made to feel, by magazines in particular, that they aren't doing things properly.

All computers work very quickly, so there's no real point to suggesting that a camera is doing things too quickly, almost giving it a throwaway attitude it can never possess. The compromise you speak of isn't a compromise any more than any decision process is, we can select our parameters and the camera will deliver the result.

If we want to use RAW, that's fine, but the best a friend of mine ever did was change from AdobeRGB to sRGB. His prints suddenly "sang" instead of looking dull. I wouldn't discount RAW though, and indeed shoot RAW if I need to. If I don't need to, I don't fret about it and use Premium JPEG.

RAW vs JPEG is one of those discussions without end, but I will repeat also that despite RAW processing I have yet to see any finished image in any print that actually shows the theoretical benefit. If both are done properly.

Pentax's Premium JPEG is what I use and nobody has any problems with that. The caveat is that the image is mostly right from the start, with only minimal tweaking and final sharpening applied. I don't spend hours/days/weeks working on dozens of layers. That's another matter altogether.

To put this in analog perspective, when I shot black and white film I generally used Kodak Tri-X processed in Paterson FX-39, not Kodak Technical Pan film.

That too is true Mr S, but advertisers would prefer us to think we need to constantly upgrade. Hence for the beginner, a real problem, and it's no use experienced photographers saying "you don't need that, it's easy" because when we start it isn't easy. Photography is a never ending voyage of discovery and over the past few years the pace of change has been immense.

However, that pace has slowed of late and we now have the luxury of not needing to upgrade until perhaps something fails to work. We'll have to see what happens next when we all live in the cloud and the digital world makes a very significant leap forwards. Or will we be stubborn and resist, making way for others to embrace it?

Time will tell!