Well I hope you've read the manual from cover to cover. If not, there's plenty of time to finish it while the battery charges up.

Enjoy your new camera.

I use mode 2 on the Sigma 70-200mm at the track when taking panning car shots. Works well.

The red cable is a cable release, it screws into the shutter button of film cameras including the Pentax A3. It looks as though the one you have locks as well so you can make very long 'Bulb' exposures (google it).

Re the tele-converter, if you mount it between the camera and your 50mm lens, you effectively change the apparent focal length to 150mm. You'll need to decide whether you want to keep it or not. It's unlikely to produce optically outstanding images.

Re the filters, it depends what they are and whether or not you intend to shoot film. Some of them will probably be useful on a DSLR, but I doubt there will be many.

Re the A3 camera. Put a battery, maybe two, into the bottom of it and try a film through it. Check the light seals on the back and in and around the mirror box and replace as necessary.

Sounds like you got quite a bargain there.

Do check all of the lenses for fungus before mounting them any any DSLR or storing them with other lenses.

Curious, I do exactly the opposite. The OS of the Sigma lenses has 2 options, 1 = horizontal and vertical stabilisation, and 2 = only vertical stabilisation (for panning left to right or vice versa in landscape orientation). When panning, you don't really want horizontal stabilisation because as you pan (move) the camera left or right, the horizontal stabiliser could ruin the image.

That's as I understand it anyway.

The Pentax in body SR system is either on or off in all axis' with no possibility to limit it to only one plane. I think it caters for rotational movement as well as horizontal and vertical.

I'm not sure if Sigmas system can deal with rotational movement, but I think not.

Such lenses already exist, but they are not badged Ricoh/Pentax. My choice was Sigma, there's also Tamron.

But I think the consensus is that the K-3's AF speed is probably fine, it's the cameras ability (or otherwise) to track a moving object and maintain focus on it that is as yet unknown.

Are you saving the images in cameras as RAW (PEF or DNG) or JPG?

If RAW, you will need to do some processing yourself to get the best from your images.

Partially true. After 6 months of shooting stock cars with DA*60-250mm 1:4 and DA* 50-135 1:2.8 fitted to a K-5, at the end of that time my images were better than they were than when I started.

But, by far the bigger improvement came when I invested in a K-5 II and Sigma 70-200mm 1:2.8 (OS version).

So for me, practice made a lot of difference, but so did newer technology.

Shot#5 says more about your panning skills Simon, rather than anything Pentax. Superb, 1/60th ? ? ? ?

I still manage to get motion blur panning at 1/200th with cars travelling a fraction of the speed of that Lotus.

Think I'll just give up and go and eat worms

Some of my efforts in this thread.

I'd buy it without hesitation if I hadn't bought the Sigma 70-200mm 1:2.8 last year. The FA* 80-200mm is a cracking lens.

I think the "Pentax is not for sports photographers" claim is an over exercised misnomer.

Pentax bodies aren't the problem, it's the slow focusing speed and small max aperture of the lenses that a sports photographer needs that are the problem. Thankfully other lens manufacturers come to the rescue.

I shoot motorsport with Pentax body and Sigma 1:2.8 glass, and close to the action too (the cars move faster across the frame), no issues here.