Does that mean you can practice some beer drinking with us before you travel over to Germany?

I've got the SMC-A and enjoy using it - decent quality as soon as you stop down a bit, and great focal length for dSLR. But I think the f3.5 lens is supposed to be better.....

For primes, the DA Ltd and FA Ltd are all great lenses. Look at reviews on Photozone.de to get an idea of how they perform. I don't think it's just about comparing with other manufacturers; remember Pentax is an optical company and capable of making some of the very best lenses out there.

In addiiton, Cosina-Voigtlander make great manual focus primes for PKA - 20mm, 40mm and 58mm. All are excellent and give the Ltds a good run for their money in both build and image quality.

I have not used it, but the Pentax 12-24 is generally very highly rated by owners, and covers a very useful range unless you are seriously into superwide territory.

Best equivalent to your 70-200L would be the 50-135 f2.8 DA*, which performs brilliantly.

I think the answer is "yes".

I've never owned or use the f3.5 lens so take this with a big pinch of salt, but everything I've read from people that do know the lens suggest that it is the best of the K mount 28s that Pentax has ever made.

For £40 I think you should keep quiet about where it is and snap it up quickly!

Excellent (with your name here, do we need to go to Wimbledon Common instead?!).

So three of us already, possibly four if Greytop does not have other family commitments - who else is up for a mellow evening of beer and photography?

Cheers,

Jon

Agree PG - multiple AF points great for continuous shooting of moving objects. I have found the K-7 much better in this regard than previous cameras: easily able to keep up with my in-laws' mad springer spaniel!

Hi Barrie.

The 55-300 is undoubtedly better than the 18-250 at the longer end - and performs very well for a consumer level telezoom. Even wide open at 300mm, the centre remains acceptably sharp and you can get some decent colour and contrast too. My main gripes with the lens are (1) size - although it is similar to the Tamron and Sigma equivalents so that's just what you have to put up with and (2) focus hunting at longer lengths - using quick shift MF can sometimes be a must with this lens. Unlike Tamron and Sigma 70-300 lenses, it does not offer a "macro" capability, if that's important (the 18-250 does).

The 18-250 is very good at what it does, and I think people could do much worse than have one of these and supplement with a few well-chosen primes or better zooms for when needs must. At the wider end, it is at least the equivalent and possibly better than the kit 18-55. Although at 18mm you do get a fair amount of barrel distortion and vignetting until it's stopped down a fair bit. It starts to fall behind the longer you go - and I think by the time you get close to the 250mm maximum, it would be easy to see the difference between the two lenses. The centre always remains acceptably sharp with my copy though, but bokeh can be ropey. The 55-300 gives slightly warmer colours and punchier results.

One other thing about the 18-250 - because it is an internal focus design, it's actually only 250mm when focused at infinity - and rather less than that the closer you are to the object you're photographing. Probably not a big issue for most people.

And I can confirm that my copy on K-7 is a competent performer.

Better than the 18-250 at longer lengths, not as good as the 55-300, but good enough for those occasions when you want a compact and lightweight lens that'll cope with the British weather. It's so much smaller than the 55-300, that I use it more, even though the latter provides superior image quality.

The highlight protection on K-7 works much better than the dynamic range enhancement on K20D - I never used it with the latter as the increase in noise was dramatic even at lower ISOs. With the K-7, switching highlight protection on works well and appears to have negligible impact on noise, at least at lower ISO.

Incidentally, I would need to investigate further, but I think it's also possible that the "native" ISO of the sensor in the K-7 is ISO200 rather than 100 - so you may also get increased DR by sticking with that setting in any case. Not all cameras perform at their best at the lowest possible ISO setting.

Come on all of you central London people who said you wanted to meet up....