That composite makes you wonder why they didn't use a Pentax model for a mock up. The electrical contacts inside the lens mount shows it ain't no Pentax.

All consumer cameras drop in price, eventually. If you adopt a waiting game however, you'll always be waiting and never buying because there is always something better around the corner to wait for it's price to drop. Then another comes along . . .

The K20D is a superb camera, as is the K-7, and the K-5. Just decide how best to spend what budget you have and go for it.

His listing title is slightly incorrect in that the lens he is selling is not a reflex (mirror) lens. He says it's the faster f8 lens, which it is, but it has a totally different construction to a reflex lens. It's a 1000mm prime lens.

Good find.

Ralf, during your testing, was your viewfinder covered, either by the proprietary cap or some other opaque material?

I didn't like it I'm afraid. It was too small for me. The film loads upside down on the right hand side compared to all other SLR's that I know of. It also had a 'crippled' mount meaning that the older manual lenses could not be used. It used 2 x CR2 batteries so the optional battery grip was a 'must have' really.

Other than that it was a very capable and feature rich camera. It's feature set is very similar to the MZ-6 film and *istD digital bodies. It has selectable focus points, wireless flash, P-TTL & TTL capable. All the normal exposure modes are available too.

A nice camera, just not for me. My MZ-6 has all the capabilities I need of a film camera, which is why I've kept it. It hasn't been anywhere near a roll of film for a very long time though.

My list is a bit boring because I've never owned an SLR that wasn't Pentax.

1: K20D **
2: K10D **
3: *istD **
4: *istDS
5: MZ-S
6: MZ-6 **
7: Super-A **
8: MZ-7
9: *ist
10: ME **

** - I still have these models

That won't be very often then because if I know Wiltshire (my grandmother came from Devizes), you don't have too many beaches very close to you.

Enjoy you knew friend.

Good luck with your new family member and I'm sure you'll enjoy the K-5. FWIW, my lens recommendation would be the DA* 60-250mm 1:4, but it is expensive and probably doesn't qualify on weight grounds.

The K-5 with the DA 50-135mm should be a good enough combo for now.

Welcome back Feeb.

I recall the reasons you switched from P to N. Does your return to P mean that your photography business is on hold/ended?

Corporate RAID systems are generally, and of necessity, well protected in secure environments, I agree. But we are talking about domestic systems here and even my newest PC has 2 x 750Gb HDD's attached to a RAID controller. They weren't configured in RAID 1 when it was delivered, but it was very simple to change the config to provide the resilience offered by RAID 1.

I've sold servers to small businesses for the past 15 years and they all, without exception, have a minimum of 4 HDD's. 3 in RAID 5 and 1 hot spare. I also setup the email facility available on most RAID controllers to send me a message when anything goes wrong, which of course it occasionally does.

Whilst RAID is technically not a backup system, it does afford a high degree of data security in the event of hardware failure of a single drive. But even RAID doesn't help much when two drives in the array fail together, as has happened to me recently.

Proper backups on separate media and preferably kept off-site is the only correct way to do it in my opinion.