Any photographer is free to use whatever marque they want to, it's their money. No doubt a fair few come back again having found that the grass isn't greener elsewhere.

There are some things that Pentax cameras do brilliantly well and some things that other makes do brilliantly well. It can be quite interesting sometimes to see photographers struggling to take shots that are a breeze with our Pentaxes, and this will work the other way round as well.

It's an endless argument without any possible resolution. Just like a Battle of the Formats, for example.

Thanks for the info Chris. Have a great weekend!

If you put in a report here then it will get picked up and sorted.

Connection, connections...the web connects people in very random ways. A chance meeting with my sister-in-law at Pennington Flash started it all!

So welcome back!

Well put Kim C and I agree, let's not take the fun out of it!

In one way that's true, but on the other hand digital sensors like telecentric lenses, and especially the old wide angles are definitely not telecentric. So they are worse on digital. It does depend on the individual lens of course, and I'm happy with the FA 20-35mm f/4 on the K-1. The 17-28mm also gives a great performance, so there are definitely good ones.

Some of the film era lenses don't have enough resolution to get the best out of the K-1, but others are fine, it's knowing which are which that's the trick, so we can avoid buying things to find out.

The new D-FA* 50/1.4 is much better than the FA version. The difference in resolution is very marked, but it also has that magic quality that makes a great lens, the qualities that can't be measured but give the lens its character. The FA lens is a bit bland for me. The 43mm is better and has a special character of its own, but the new lens is better again by a good margin.

Coatings are a very important factor. An uncoated 4 element lens might lose 35% of the light to reflection and internal scattering. Give it a conventional single coating and that loss might be 5%, a huge difference. Give it the latest multicoating and it could be well under 1%. Thus 20 plus element lenses become possible.

f stops are a physical measurement, but there is also a thing called the T stop, which is the effective transmission value. Usually T stops are used in cinematography lenses. In still photography, so such distinction is usually needed. We talk in f stops because we are more interested in the depth of field rather than miniscule differences in exposure that probably are less than the levels of exposure accuracy we work to anyway.

It's been discussed several timesand on balance it has always been decided to keep the unique flavour of the site as is, but no doubt it will come up again.

Incidentally, this section is intended to be a General Digital Photography section for discussion of Photoshop, printing, and so on. It's never clearly worked out like that!

ePHOTOzine covers all the rest of the various marques as well as Pentax and is the sister-site to this one.

Welcome home!