Hmmmm, I'm not amused. £639 was supposed to be a special price. Now it's even more special. I was under the impression prices were going up, not down, else I wouldn't have bought at the higher price.

I don't think you'll find that's got anything to do with electrical power consumption.

The ease of cleaning/destroying fungus is entirely governed by :-

1: How deep into the lens assembly the fungus actually is, and
2: How easy/difficult the lens is to dismantle.

If the fungus is on the inside of the front or rear element and the affected element is simple enough to remove, the fungus is easily cleaned.

If the fungus is between cemented lens elements forming part of a group, the lens is bin fodder unless it is really worth doing it, say to Unlocker's 250-600mm monster, for example.

Prime lenses are more easily disassembled than zooms, or rather, primes are more easily reassembled.

It is quite likely that you will need some specialist tools like lens spanners etc. which you can buy from Micro-Tools.

The ReadyNAS Duo is ideal for the home and I'd certainly recommend that you add the 2nd drive to give you RAID 1 security for the data it holds. I would not advise buying from eBay. Instead, buy the drive from a reputable source, and buy new, not refurbished (some call it re-manufactured).

One of my 1Tb Seagate drives died in mine and it was replaced under warranty by Seagate with a re-manufactured one. It lasted less than a year. It was again replaced under warranty, this time with a new one.

Slightly OT: For my needs, storing image files on a NAS box works well. Lightroom however, will not save it's catalog file to anything other than a local drive. To ensure I don't lose it, the catalog is backed up to my NAS box every time I exit Lightroom.

Which NAS solution did you go for?

I have one of the older Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ units with 3 x 1Tb HDD's in XRAID (1.7Tb usable). I have created two shares which backup to 2 separate 1Tb HDD's connected to the rear USB ports. Backup is automatic and I have it backing up every 4 hours. Once every 4 weeks, it wipes the backup drives and starts again.

As for network, the ReadyNAS has 1 x 1Gb connection to a Netgear DGN3500 router, which in turn provides 4 x 300Mb/s wireless connections and 4 x 1Gb wired connections. I have wireless repeaters serving the remote parts of my house. By remote parts, I don't mean that my house is enormous, but there is a lot of brick, steel, and concrete for the signal to propagate through.

The ReadyNAS also has a Firefly option, which is an iTunes server. That doesn't work too well with huge numbers of music files though.

Completeness of the kit will also influence the price. An unboxed body/battery/charger will be less expensive than a body with all it's original accessories and box.

The AF280T will work in either of it's 2 Auto modes (Red & Green position on the switch). It will also work manually at full output.

It will not work using it's TTL capability because the K110D camera uses only P-TTL and not the older TTL system for controlling flash output.

I have no experience of the Cobra D650 flash.

For me, the buildings in the foreground of the first image should be sharp, but they aren't. What lens did you use?

Care to enlighten us? What is yours?

This type of confrontation is becoming all too common.

Use a P&S camera, which can produce very commercially usable images, or an umpteen Mp mobile phone camera, and nobody bats an eye.

What is this world coming to?