I have used my grandmother's K1000 I think and the lack of a shutter lock is a major annoyance - I have to resist winding after each shot to leave it ready and then remember to wind for the next shot. A real pain.

I saw this on the Cash Converters site and thought it might be of interest to someone. The price is about 1/3 less than the new price from SRS, which seems good to me. It would come with a one year warranty and it's in their Stockport shop.

https://www.cashconverters.co.uk/shop/phones-cameras--computers/cameras/lenses--...

Insist on opening a complaint so it goes to their complaints department. When it becomes clear that it's less bother for them to just fix or replace it than deal with the complaint they should change their tune.

Some interesting stuff there but I've no experience with auctioneer's lots - any recommendations or things to be wary of?

I've never heard of people having problems in India. There are many places I would think twice, maybe take older (less valuable) gear, but India isn't on the list.

My DA 40mm Limited's AF locked up a few years ago because one of the internal cogs broke and jammed the mechanism, and I've read of similar reports on other AF lenses. It cost me very little to get fixed, about €50. Obviously this is a much older model and the cogs may be different but cogs are something that can be supplied to quite exact specifications for not a huge amount of money. Just saying, without being an expert, that fixing this could possibly be not a huge task.

TBH with this kind of processing it's hard to reach any kind of conclusions on how well the lens performs. The saturation and contrast would need to be really toned down to normal levels for that.

Old ultra-wides, especially third-party ones, tend to perform quite poorly. You need to get them already understanding that they'll probably need to be stopped down to f/8 or f/11 at all times. As long as you understand that then it's fine, they are what they are.

They seem to be under-exposed by about a stop or a bit more. If you don't want to involve a PC then that's fixable in-camera if you shoot RAW.

Contrast and saturation are far too high for my liking, otherwise some nice compositions.

Firstly, the 645Z is a DSLR, just a bit bigger than the ones you already have.

Secondly, it's a lot of money to spend on a maybe unless you've handled one before and like how it works and the images it produces.

Thirdly, the Pentax 645 is a dead mount, so you need to be OK with that.

Personally, in your situation if I wanted to stick with Pentax I'd go for a K-1 and then I could use all my existing lenses on it.