Have you tried cleaning the electrical contacts? My preferred method is with a soft cloth with about one drop of WD40. Don't overdo the cleaning or touch the rear lens with the cloth and leave it for a while before refitting it to the camera.

Finally, try turning the AF coupling of the lens with a suitably sized flatblade screwdriver. It should not need much effort at all to turn it. If it doesn't turn, its faulty.

Don't risk damaging your camera with it either.

Failing all that, send it back for a refund and look for another sample. The lens is excellent and you will not be disappointed when you find a good one.

The SMC Pentax-FA 80-320mm is indeed an AF lens. It sounds to me like its faulty.

Do you have other AF lenses that do work OK on your MZ6?

Have you tried the lens on another body?

I sent you a PM.

Regards,

Money spent on a cheap tripod will soon be regretted when you discover that the whole outfit is not as 'stiff' as you had hoped. For a tripod to be effective you need:-

Legs that don't bend or have loose fitting joints.
A head that does not move when locked.
An adapter plate to fit your camera that does not move under the weight of the camera.

If you buy Manfrotto, Gitzo, or any of the top names, possibly even some of the Velbon range, you will not go far wrong.

However, there are many other things to consider when choosing a tripod. These are a few that were important to me.

Do you want tripod stability with the camera at near to ground level?If so, a tripod having a centre column that can't be removed will not be much use. Neither will a tripod who's legs cannot be extended to the horizontal.

Will you be using your tripod in windy conditions? If so, it will need a hook from which to hang your sack of bricks (camera bag) to stop it from being blown over.

Will you need a leveller (spirit level), ball, 2, or 3 way head, the ability to fix the camera upside down under the centre column, or rubber leg sleeves for winter handling.

Perhaps most important of all questions . . . do I want a black or silver tripod. Not such a daft question. You will not want shiny silver if you main use is wildlife photography. Also, in hot conditions, black can be unbearable to handle.

Finally on the carbon fibre front. Great, very light if you are carrying it more than using it, but maybe too light in windy situations and can be damaged by freezing conditions.

I use a Manfrotto 055PROB with a Manfrotto 488RC2 ball head for general work. This has a removeable centre column which can also be fixed horizontally across the top of the legs (to which I added spiked feet). I use a Manfrotto 190C with a mini-ball head attached for photography on the move and a Manfrotto monopod. All of these are very stiff (resistant to movement) combinations. I gave my Slik 88 (used and abused for about 25 years) with its new Manfrotto 3 way head to my son.

I've often thought that, when faced with a macro shot, bracketed focussing would be useful. It ought to be simple enough to instruct the modern 'intelligent' camera where you want the forward and rear focus points to be and how many 'slices' you want, then it can do the maths and take 3, 4, or 5 shots between these 2 datum points. Then we can spend hours stitching them together to get a resulting image where the whole of the spider, fly or plant etc. is in focus. Maybe even the camera can blend the shots itself but leave the originals as well so that we can try and make a better job of it

The shallow depth of field shots are good but if you actually want to capture and study all of the detail in a particular subject, it can be quite difficult to achieve and sometimes, impossible.

This of course would only be useful if the magnification of the lens remained constant within a particular focussing range . . . but small changes in magnification might not be too troublesome. to correct.

I totally agree with keeping data safe somewhere other than an internal HD, if its not RAID5 anyway. Apart from accidentally deleting files, RAID is pretty safe against data loss from HD failure unless the box gets hit by lightning, a truck, or some other 'all destroying' disaster.

My 'habit' is to get my pics off of the memory card onto the HD and backup to both tape and an external HD. I just got caught out this time, between backups. I really should have kept my pics on the RAID5 array. Then again, they would have been inaccesible until the machine was restored to working order which I did not have time to do.

My business data is backed up to tape and stored in a fireproof safe.

At least with my backup on external HD plus the files I recovered from the failed drive, I've ended up not losing anything.

Unless of course you meant changing to the mac 'habit', which is a bit of a tall order for me. I'm an 'old dog' and I don't do 'new tricks'

Matt's idea of network accesible/addressable storage (NAS) is a good one though and one that I might consider in the future. That said, it might be cheaper to build a PC with a RAID5 array, load it with Linux, and use that for storage. On that front, I note that Microsoft now offers a Windows Storage Server which I will investigate as a possibility.

Pause for thought:

Maybe we should transfer our digital images to film for safer storage

I suppose I ought to tell the whole story now, though I'm ashamed to tell it as I tell all of my customers that I'm an IT professional

The machine that died on me has 6 x 160Gb Maxtor SATA drives in it. 3 of them configured as a RAID5 array and one as a hot spare. Belt and braces you'd think.

Trouble is, RAID only works to preserve data if the data is on it in the first place. Mine wasn't, which is why it caused me some grief

I did at least have a 250Gb external drive attached, on which I had a copy of most of my photo's.

In UK, 3 Windows servers are used to run my business. ALL of them have RAID5 + hot spare configurations and have tape backup systems.

Well we can all make mistakes . . . as long as we learn from them, that's OK with me ? At the end of the day, I suffered only inconvenience, no data was lost once I'd recovered the files from the dead drive . . . which goes in the bin today

BTW, for those interested who don't know about RAID arrays. RAID5 are fault tolerant configurations using a number of disk drives where the data is spread around all disks in the array. In plain and simple RAID5 configuration using a minimum of 3 disks your data is safe, even if a drive fails. To be really safe, a hot spare is needed as well, which is deployed automatically by the controller to take the place of the failed drive. In this configuration, you can have 2 drives fail and your data is still safe. Failed drives in RAID5 config must be replaced by drives having the same or larger capacity.

Don,

Thanks for your insight. RAID is not natively available within Windows desktop OS's, only Windows Server OS's. It can of course be installed by the inclusion of a suitable RAID controller (Adaptec preferred), and booting from that. I had actually considered reloading my broken PC with Windows 2003 server and using software RAID for that very reason. Hardware based RAID is always better (read faster) but the emergency recovery systems I use often don't support the RAID controller. Losing the system drive is a real pain in any flavour of Windows, or any other OS for that matter.

I plan to retire to Spain very soon (mid September if my house sale proceeds as planned), I might well look at a Mac machine then. Trouble is, I've worked with Microsoft software since day 1 and moving to another OS, plus the change in applications, is a bit daunting to say the least. Not to mention the cost. I guess I'll have to sell some of my Pentax gear to fund it

Thanks for the education.

Kind regards,

Don,

I don't know so much about the smart bit . . . after all, I'm not using a mac

Your prowess in your chosen field of photography is obviously a talented gift that you have and good luck to you. I am not in the photographic/imaging business, a mere amateur, but an enthusiastic one.

Let me put the record straight a little. I do not, and never have, knocked the later Apple products. I have tried to use one, I just don't feel comfortable with them. I also worked for many years on UNIX based systems (before LINUX was even heard of). I know Windows very well . . . and I know mostly what is good and bad about it. I also know that I am comfortable with its limitations and quirks. Apple products over the years have carved a name for themselves in the graphics industry, but that's about it as far as I know. It is unlikely that you will find a Mac or Linux box running your local supermarkets cash registers, for example, not if they are a big chain anyway. Well, actually, you might find a Linux box in some of them nowadays.

Windows has come a long way it seems from your last encounter, and from your CPU description, I'd guess you were using version 3.x or possibly 95, 98 at a push. As long as reasonable quality hardware is used, the BSOD is almost unheard of nowadays with Windows XP. I have to use the professional flavour of XP because I always work in a domain environment.

I make my living out of selling Microsoft products, therefore I need to use Microsoft products, no matter what. I am never likely to buy a mac anything for that one reason alone.

Windows XP is a very stable operating system, it's some of the trash software that gets loaded onto it that causes it to be unstable. Some of it from Microsoft, I agree, but no where near all.

As for Microsoft products vulnerability to hackers, viruses et al, there are more 'bums on seats' sitting in front of a Windows PC screen than there are any other OS. If the mac OS or UNIX in its various guises was as popular (server applications excepted), they would be equally popular targets for those who derive some warped pleasure or financial gain from disrupting commerce and industry generally, of that I am certain.

A true short story, entirely related to this issue.

I have just returned to UK from Spain where I took several hundred wildlife photo's of bugs and things tiny. Last Sunday, I turned my home built PC on to find it would not boot. Further intensive investigation, much to the annoyance of my wife, showed the C: drive (system drive) to be there and working as far as I could tell at that stage. . . but it was completely empty. I had backed up my important stuff to tape only a few days before but nevertheless, I lost several hundred photo's which p**s*d me of more than a little and I had no time to source a new disk and rebuild it so it got shelved for the time being.

I hurriedly reinstalled my decommissioned laptop for my wife to use until I go back, then left on Friday with the failed C: drive.

I got the failed drive (Maxtor 160Gb SATA) back to UK where I have more equipment, software, and time to deal with this kind of problem and in a few hours, with the aid of R-Studio (brilliant piece of software), I recovered all my lost photo's plus some other files I had forgotten about.

It turns out that the disk has a number of badly failed sectors, mostly to do with the Master Boot Record (MBR) and other fairly critical areas that caused it not to boot. . . and guess what, it's just out of warranty.

Now there is no OS that I know of that can withstand a catastrophic hardware failure such as this was unless the system drive is a fault tolerant RAID array which is not really appropriate for a home Windows/Mac/Linux box (well I thought not, I'm beginning to know better). I managed to get the data recovered very quickly on my Windows PC, I'm not so sure I could have recovered my data so easily if I were using any other OS.