Nearly 15 months is some prevarication mattie, you could have had 15 months of good use and fun out of buying something....

Well, nobody did actually say that, but in any event we do need to respect the opinions of others.

I would suggest starting simple, but first you could look at the reviews I did on ePHOTOzine for the E-5, K-5 and K-5 II.

Why not go for camera body plus, say 18-135mm, which gives you a nice gritty lens that is also weather-resistant. Then you will probably be looking at a wider lens, maybe the Pentax 12-24mm, but maybe the wider Sigmas looking at what you use already.

As for telephoto, the Pentax 55-300mm is excellent and not super-expensive.

If higher cost is acceptable, then there are higher cost options from the DA* lenses. However, you will not find the lenses first mentioned to be a disappointment compared to, say, the Olympus 12-60mm, which is expensive although excellent itself.

Because it reduces the options for very low and very high ISO settings. It also changes the tonal values, which may or may not be what we want.

By its very nature yes. The camera captures the RAW data and if you have it set to JPEG it saves the parameters designated as a JPEG. This is why you can opt to also save a RAW file, provided you do it straight away before you make another JPEG capture, even when set to JPEG only.

It's a useful feature.

No, not by a long way. Many people do shoot using RAW capture, but many use JPEG capture.

Unless we need to shoot RAW, we use Premium JPEG as our capture method.

Many thanks to Chris for giving us the advance warning of a possible price rise, much appreciated.

Sadly, all offers do eventually end!

You've picked upa three-year-old thread here! I've not re-read this thread, but events may have moved on since then.

The most problematic thing is the speed of focus. The zoom is more than enough, but the time the bridge cameras take to lock on and shoot can be relatively long.

I have used an X90 for some bird shots and it's not impossible, but certainly it's not easy and the X-5 may not be so different. However, to be fair, that applies to most if not all compacts and they are used to good effect.

Alkaline batteries should happily last for 6 months and silver oxide for 12 months, so unusual battery drain could indicate a fault.

When using auto exposure, also bear in mind that the speeds are seamlessly variable and that the speed indication is only an approximate value. The camera will deliver, for example, 1/213s if that is what is needed, but the speed indicated will be approximate.

In practical terms, where one stop is a doubling or halving of exposure, the difference between 4s and 6s is really quite small.