I saw one the other day. I have no use for one but what a little jewel. If I were a rich man I'd buy one just because it's so tiny and pretty.

It's a good bit of polemic but he might as well shout down a well really.

Theory on this sort of thing goes round in circles Why not try both and see which works best?

The main part of a laps income is not from the newspaper use that you see first but from subsequent library sales to magazines and publications worldwide. For magazine use at 300dpi a centre spread will need a good pixel count, possible poster or promotional use even more.

The more and bigger pixels the more flexibility your sales guy has in chasing sales after the initial flurry.

I have a 200mm f2.8 and I can tell you wide open especially, it PFs in spades.

As a working professional, I needed my Hasselblad 6x6 and Mamiya 6x7 because clients would need 6ft and more prints for mural and large display. Also, magazine picture editors often liked to see large format transparencies because they were incapable of interpreting 35mm.

For full frame and more to mean anything useful, you would have to need the definition it gives. If you only ever view on a 1650px width monitor, then any pixels beyond that must be discarded. If you have a camera that gives 6000px width, that will suffice for prints at 300dpi of 20 inches width.

If you do not view on bigger monitors or print larger than that, then the extra sensor size is simply adding pixels that must be interpreted in software and discarded. Why? Cropping? We all now have nice versatile zoom lenses.

The only reason, if you do not need the surplus pixels, to pay for them, is the same reason you buy a car capable of 200mph in a country with a 70mph (or 80) limit. It's a man thing

Yes, true, if you did a type of photography that did not involve people or selling your work, the things I mention wouldn't matter at all.

I think most successful professional photographers would agree, though, that there are many, many talented photographers who can turn out consistently good pictures but that has little to do with whether they would make a good professional or not.

As an example, I play guitar to a pretty good standard but when I played with any band, I found that having to play what other people wanted to hear, when and where they wanted to hear it, removed the pleasure for me. It became too much like hard work. But the guys who stuck with it, they weren't always the best players but they were willing to do what was necessary to get heard and they lapped up the appreciation of the audience. It was their personality that made them pros, not their playing. Me, essentially, given the compromises and work necessary to make the grade professionally, with my guitar I wasn't up to doing it. But with my camera, I was.

It did account for why so much of my work was with musicians, though, as you can see from my web site. That's one of the great things about photography, you can combine your interests with photography and come up with a winning and happy combination.

As someone who earned their living their entire working life as a photographer, I can say that looking at someone's pictures is no criterion for judging whether they'd make a professional or not.

The best photographer I ever knew was an amateur but he'd have made a lousy pro. Far too artistic and uncompromising and he had no conversation. One of the best pros I knew was no photographer at all by the standards of folk here but everyone he met loved him, he was entertaining, full of ideas and he was highly ambitious. A great combination for a professional photographer.

You can learn photography. You can't learn personality.

I only mentioned it because the price I paid was way below what I could get anywhere else. Similarly, I got a 35mm f2 brand new in box in PC World for £100 and a Pentax flash in Jessops, selling for absolute minimum £150 odd elsewhere for £95, box, guarantee and all.

I do like my bargains.

I actually bought 3 special offer Manfrotto tripods in PC World for £60 and got just under £100 each on eBay. I think these shops just lose interest in certain items and want to offload them.

I bought a 200mm f2.8 in Jessops Oxford Street recently at the lowest price I had ever seem for one. It was the last one they had, no surprise the rest had gone so quickly.

I never rule anywhere out when I'm looking to buy - and Jessops, like PC World, have some great - if unexpected - bargains at times.