The ground glass (actually plastic these days) screen is very soft and you will no doubt have ruined it by cleaning. Never touch the screen or the mirror on any SLR or digital SLR.

The MV1 is not expensive second hand, so the best option will be to look out for a good one on eBay. That will hopefully cost you less than £20, maybe only £10, and will be considerably cheaper than sending your to have a screen replacement. It's not a DIY job.

The kit lens does come with a hood, but the exceptions are the DA-L lenses, which do not.

I always assume the use of a hood and the one thing that modern lenses tend to enjoy is an included and dedicated hood. That was progress, whenever it started.

The two designs have different purposes.

The f1.4 is a reportage/low light lens and as such has high contrast but lower micro-detail. So you would expect high MTF20 results and moderately high MTF50 results. It will not have as flat a field at close distances and is not ideal for attaching to bellows.

The f1.7 design will have higher micro-detail and a flatter field, so it's the lens to abuse for multiple purposes.

However, although the two lenses differ in detail, they are both excellent lenses.

The lenses I find much more to my taste are the 43mm f1.9 Limited and the 40mm f2.8 Limited. Lenses are more than just technical results and some will suit individual photographers better than others.

Clearly the cold light of day isn't working, so we'll close this off now before we have a major fight on our hands.

Hopefully in the cold light of day the bickering will stop.

Suppose instead, Alan, it said, Hotpoint will take no responsibility if you use anything else but Persil? Then we can take that on board and decide for ourselves. I don't think the battery argument is much more than that really.

As for coffee, my tastes keep changing, but there are plenty of exotic varieties to choose from with no consequences.

I'm not sure admire is the right word, we seem to have suffered from a very strange exchange rate for many years. $1=£1 usually, which has never made sense.

However, maybe the relative size of the markets doesn't help. Something pretty much marque-neutral.

There's nothing new being added to this discussion, if it is a discussion rather than general bickering, so let's not make this discouraging for people to state opinions. Once is enough, constantly repeating the same things does not help, we can hear you.

And I'm not referring to any one person, just before anyone feels slighted....

We've been over this time and again, so please don't turn it into a battle guys.

State an opinion but let others have an opinion too.