Why can't you produce some record shots Dave? Just pop down to a local church or house with a tripod and make some record shots of some carvings or statues, or anything that catches your eye.

You could do that over the weekend perhaps?

FA (and D-FA) lenses are full frame. DA lenses are intended for APS-C.

Posts temporarily removed pending discussion.

The explanation I read was that the format covered by Pentax DA lenses was generally a generous APS-C, so this makes allowance for movement of the sensor as it shifts for SR. This is not the same as them covering a full frame area.

It's part of the function of forums to speculate, so it will be interesting to see who is closest in a couple of years time.

There's little point in having a fear of what may or may not happen as fortunes of all companies can go up and down in unexpected ways. In 1964 you would have had you money on Nikon, Pentax, Minolta and Canon, possibly in that order, as the biggest names. By 1974 in might have been Canon, Nikon, Pentax and Olympus. Now, I guess it's Nikon, Canon, Sony and Pentax.

There are plenty of lenses and bodies still around for most options, so there will be I think plenty of Pentax for longer than we'll all care about it.

The focal length of a lens is as marked, regardless. However, the coverage, that is, the size of the image circle the lens projects, depends on the format it is intended for. For a given format, the focal length needed for a "standard" lens varies, usually taken to be the measure of the diagonal of the frame.

So a "standard" lens for a 35mm film camera is technically a 43mm, but more usually 50mm.

The "standard" lens for APS-C is about 35mm, so you are correct that it will show a similar image to a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera.

On APS-C, the 50mm is a short telephoto, just about right for portraits. The 55mm is almost exactly equivalent to the 85mm so popular as a portrait lens on 35mm film.

Hope that helps!

Sorted....

I can see what you've tried to do, but the result is that much of the image is one of blurred leaves (the part of the image you like) and the rest a sharp building (the bit you don't like), so my suggestion would be that you do this the other way round. That is, sharp leaves and the building as a less sharp backdrop. With a smallist aperture, both should be reasonable remdered.

You might have to use a wider lens to achieve this, as the 28mm is pretty much a wide standard lens on APS-C.

F lenses have macro settings rather than the continuous fousing range of the FA and later lenses. The F 35-70mm is OK, but not remarkable IMHO. The macro setting makes it messy to use under some circulstances.

The DA 17-70mm or 18-135mm seem to be good options for you Andrew.

It is indicating that when you view the JPEG file you have an option to save the RAW file in the buffer if you wish to. This only happens when you have just taken a shot and you view the image straight away.

It's a feature that can be useful, it's quite normal and won't cause any problems.