Sorry, Mike, looking at my post, it looks a little brusque. I didn't mean it that way, I was just curious why it mattered. Blimey, that's good, isn't it?

I've bought lots of my gear from SRS without even knowing that.

Jessups. why? I'd give a copy of the receipt of course. I don't know if you can transfer warranties but I'm sure there'd be a way.

Not that I've ever had a lens pack up on me.

Yes, pulled out. Yes, I'll knock the eBay fee off. It would have been the max of £40, so that'd be £488 but there is the postage of about £12 including insurance. Can we say £500 posted?

If you are in London, we could meet up, of course.

I have one which was eBayed last week but the buyer hasn't paid. It went for £528.

It was bought in July last year so still under warranty and is in completely new condition, no marks anywhere. In other words, if you bought a new one you would be buying nothing different except 6 months more waraanty!

Pictures Here

I'd never thought of that. But yes, I'm used to and comfortable here and there is plenty of stuff that's not Pentax specific.

The only thing is, if Pentax come out with some amazing new whatever and I feel the buying urging coming on, my wife will come round to all your houses with a gun

I'd love one of those! I saw one in Jacobs and handled it a bit. I wondered whether they sold many and the guy said, yes they sold them regularly but obviously not in quantity.

When my ship comes in, a Leica dealer will be my first port of call. Unfortunately, going by my past performances, when my ship comes in, I will be at the airport.

I half agree. I agree that a small body with a big lens is pointless from the size aspect but the size of my Pentax outfit doesn't concern me. I carry it all in a back pack of a perfectly manageable size. It's the weight.

For a carry everywhere, I use an Olympus E-PL3 with the Panasonic X compact zoom on it, tiny enough to go into a large coat pocket or any bag but still good enough for my stock stuff. It's a great luxury to have two cameras for different purposes but needing only one set of lenses.

Incidentally, I've just weighed my GH2 with 12mm f2, 20mm f1.7 and 45mm f1.8, my basic working outfit - it comes in at just under 900gms!

I didn't have an ex Hendrix one but I did have a Strat until recently, a lovely black one with rosewood fingerboards which I played at least as well as, if not better than Hendrix.

I would go on stage at the O2, plug it in to my Marshall stack,and invoke some howling feedback which I would shape into the National Anthem. Then, with the crowd going wild I'd launch into Johnny B Goode, my second song and already the crowd were on their feet dancing and cheering which would continue into the intro to my third song

This song would start with a loud and insistent bleeping noise and a Welsh accented voice announcing a fresh crisis in the Euro zone and.......B****r! Time to get up

I saw the programme with the photographer whose business had fallen through the floor. He's one of many, I think. Certainly I hear about some of the successful magazine photographers I knew now adding to the congestion in the wedding photography business.

I take the point of Pentax producing a compact camera body but the trouble is, if you use the same lenses, you lose the weight and size advantages of M43. The K5 is already compact. It's the lenses that add the weight.

I'd liked the idea of the panacakes on a compact body but as Pentaxophile pointed out it just ain't that simple, sadly.

All the attributes you quote are true. The AF is superb, in fact.

The difference comes with the dynamic range. With the K5, I was constantly amazed at how I could look at the histogram, see burned out highlights....and pull them back in to show detail. Ditto shadows.

The 4/3 has much less leeway and if I can, not sports pix, obviously, I will actually consult the histogram and get as much in bounds a possible. Makes a big difference. With the K5, you can often just shoot and worry about the exposure afterwards. Suddenly, I realise, I am always talking about RAW files, as I never use jpg except for eBay shots.

With the GH2, you have a pretty limited range of lenses, especially at the long focus end. And the sheer versatility of the K5 is stunning. Effectively, there are lenses, adapters and equipment for anything you might want to do. Not so the four thirds. I can manage because what I do these days is under my control. But if I were still operating even semi-professionally, the 4/3 would be sadly lacking. A 150mm (300 equiv) f2.8? Pentax have a superb one. Panasonic.....ermmmmm...maybe one day.

It is undeniable that in order to take up 4/3 as the basis for a system, up to the present time, you have to compromise on what you do. If I were advising someone younger, I'd say, hang the weight, buy the Pentax.

The K5 itself, a little gem in my view, is hardly bigger or heavier than the GH2 anyway. but the laws of physics dictate the lenses are bigger and heavier. Lens design for micro four thirds obviously must have its design constraints too but you can see with the APS-C sensor that the Sony Nex cameras bodies can be tiny but optical laws mean the lenses are big, in my view nullifying the point of the small body.

Something I hadn't thought at all of was mentioned by Pentaxophile. Of course! You couldn't just put a Pentax pancake on a Pentax micro 4/3 because you would need an adapter to move the lens out from the camera body to get the focal distance....and it wouldn't be a pancake, more a cupcake.

Cabstar, yes looking back at my library with Rex Features and on my website, I had some great clients and got to see and work with some great stars, film, music fashion and all.

I was fortunate to be a photographer at a time when the world of the arts and show business was less controlled than now and photographers and their craft were as highly regarded and as valued as the musicians and stars they worked with.

Digital photography changed something much more fundamental than just swapping film for pixels. It democratized photography in that more people could more easily master the technique but it also sadly has left anyone who owns an expensive camera thinking they are a good photographer and - even worse - other people agreeing with them.

Strange, because no-one would assume that because someone owns a Steinway piano, it makes them a great pianist.

I have, but with the roads as they are and 6 to 7kg of cameras on my back as I fall down potholes and shudder over ripples on my bike, I need to do something soon, else I won't be able to carry any cameras, lightweight or not

Which begs the question would I change my outfit if I did my work at home or in a studio. No, absolutely not, unless it was all in a studio, in which case a 645 would be rather nice...