Some lowlight MX-1 shots:

Having looked at my images from the MX-1, the combination of bright lens and SR means that most of the time I find it possible to keep to around ISO400 even when the light is poor:

Hello Jemma, I do have a copy of the Tamron....have sent you a pm.

Best wishes,

Jon

I agree, but unless you get a camera with a decent optional EVF (eg the Olympus XZ), which puts the price up a lot, and adds bulk, or you buy a Canon Powershot G (awful tunnel viewfinder barely worth bothering with), there are few compact options with a decent viewfinder esp in the £200 price range. For a bit more money, the Fuji X20 (or even X10 if you can find one) might be worth a look, but I think the MX-1 beats them for image quality (aside from lovely Fuji colours).

Sadly the cost of good quality processing and my lack of space for a darkroom is why I sold my film gear. My camera was great....a Nikon FE....and I also loved using a Pentax MX. For occasional fun I'd suggest looking into medium format...and you could do worse than a Lubtel. That way you get something that's very different to what up can do with digital.

I'd also strongly recommend the MX-1. Aside from good results, including surprisingly good at highish ISOs, the flip out LCD can be very useful for discrete street photography, and the camera is also quite speedy including focus speeds (my experience with Canon G9/10 is that the Pentax is much faster in this department). You pay for it by slow clearing of the buffer especially with raw shots, but at least you've already taken them by then....

Wow - superb images of very interesting building. Particularly like the view from the second floor.

Thanks all for nice feedback everyone - and for those who would like a reasonable and good value telezoom with more reach than the 50-200, I think you can't go too far wrong with the Tamron. It does suffer from fringing on occasion, but nothing that bothered me on the shots above, and nothing that can't easily be dealt with in Lightroom.

Very nice. I was trying some flower close ups today (nowhere near the magnification of yours) and found myself wishing for an articulated LCD...to avoid contemplating the fact that I might be getting older than I care to admit!

Nice - a cut above a lot of the shots you often see of the Great Court. Particularly like the last one - the people give it a sense of scale and the shadows work well.

It's been a Tamron day today - which meant taking off the Tamron 17-50 which normally sits on my camera and replacing it first with the 70-300 for the morning dog-walk (this lens is ridiculously good value), and then with my 500/8 mirror lens coupled with the (also Tamron) 1.4X Pz AF teleconverter. The results:










I'd been hoping for some wildlife in the park this morning, but nothing much doing - hence the plantlife instead (plus a bug or two). The mirror lens + TC combo did a pretty decent job of the moon though - definitely a viable combination for reasonably static objects (with no nasty background to provoke the doughnut bokeh).

Cheers,

Jon