Impeccable, beautiful and fascinating. Superb images.

Superb!

Nice one, very Victorian! This would make a great book illustration. The tones are really excellent.

Great shots with gorgeous colour, but I'm not too happy with the flare.

Lots of lovely IR light! Maybe a touch darker would give more impact to the darker areas as well, but it is a tricky balance.

Vauxhall Zafira Tourer, enough room for all the family when needed, plus luggage, plus camera kit.

I've removed the duplicated thread and moved this one to Lenses.

We recently updated our car and for the first time in a long time I started buying car magazines again. It used to be quite a passion but had faded away, probably doing 50,000 miles a year for business. Then I even started getting interested in the RAC e-mails I was receiving.

What's this got to do with photography? Jargon, abbreviations, assumptions that we all know what we're talking about.....the car stuff is full of such things. I was so out of date that I didn't know what an SUV was. I guessed "Small Utility Vehicle" which is close, but wrong.

The beginner to photography needs our help, faced with a mass of mysterious concepts, abbreviations, assumptions and all sorts of jargon. Every field of activity loves its jargon.

So I'm thinking of those first steps into photography, where it was all unknown and when I asked questions of others, even those who should know in shops, they plainly didn't know. Even some veteran camera club members were a bit wooly on what it was all about. It's dazzling for the beginner, but we know that, eventually, it will all click into place. So hang in there if this is you!

In a way Peter, I know what you mean. But every item made by man is subject to potential failure and sometimes we get something that seems inherently unreliable, for whatever reason.

The new 50mm f/1.4 is also labelled SDM, but it's not the same motor or design. Things move on.

Pentax do have ambassadors and you'll even find a very active one here on this forum.

As for quality, Pentax engineering and manufacturing quality is excellent, and that's the bit that is of value to us. Certainly other manufacturers also have excellent standards. We expect excellence probably and it becomes the norm. I think standards are probably higher now than they have ever been as very high precision tooling produces parts with very close tolerances, maybe even better than what is possible by hand.