It's a small red led which is supposed to assist fitting lenses in the dark. Not very useful I'm afraid. I have mine turned off. I'll check later as to whether it lines up with the plastic blob on MF lenses. As far as I know the MZ-S was the only body to feature this . . . err . . . feature. It has since been excluded from newer models.

I'm not sure it has a documented purpose. I've used it in the past to help me mount the lens. Body in left hand, lens in right hand, put your thumb on the blob, hold it a little bit below horizontal, you'll find that it lines up (roughly) with the body and shouldn't be too difficult to fit the lens even with your eyes shut.

The MZ-S has a lens index lamp, maybe it lines up with that.

I think if you state on the auction that you "reserve the right to end the auction at anytime because the item is advertised elsewhere" that you can legitimately end an auction.

Look for the Samsung equivelant, often at ridiculously low prices. I got mine for £39.00 brand new.

Lens offered for sale has oil on the diaphragm blades. It looks to me as if it has seen very little use.

The case is showing its age with wear around the fastening flap. The case has no strap.

If any of you might be interested in aquiring this lens, please PM me.

I'm also looking for suggestions about it's current value as I have no real idea. One was sold in Dec '07 on eBay for £45'ish.

Not quite, the DA* 50-135mm is a 1:2.8 lens.

Glad you got it sorted. Sorry I didn't think to recommend changing the batteries.

Hi and welcome to the forum.

First, check that focus confirmation sound is turned on in custom settings.

Do you get the focus confirmation beep when focussing manually? You should hear it.

Do you get the focus confirmation hexagon in the viewfinder? You should see it.

Have you checked that the AF-S/AF-C/MF switch is set to one of the AF settings?

Have you removed the focussing screen for cleaning, and perhaps not refitted it correctly?

Try resetting the camera to factory defaults, then try again. Also check that your camera has the latest firmware installed. To check this, turn power off, press and hold the menu button, turn power on. The version number 1.02 should appear on your rear screen.

Do you have originals + a backup, or do you have your data/images only in one place, on the external drive?
If you have only one copy, you will at some point lose something by accidentally deleting it. You'll lose everything if the drive's electronics fails in some way.

Believe me, it happens. If you haven't had a hard drive fail in 10 years you can count yourself lucky.

I sell and maintain servers and PC's for a living and in the last 10 years I've had to swap out about 25 dead drives and recover the data from backups. I recently had 2 SCSI drives fail within a week of each other in the same RAID array. Admittedly, these are machines that are running 24x7 so they get a lot more use than any home PC. Almost all of these drives failed within their 3 or 5 year warranty period too.

You can't rely on touching wood when disk drives decide enough is enough. External USB or firewire HDD's are great, but I wouldn't use one as my only data repository.

And when (not if) that drive fails or is stolen, what then ?