looks good, I'll be trying that

If that were true it would be a major egg-on-face moment for Pentax, but it's not something I've heard. The K20D is the flagship model and is supposedly a major step up from the K10D, on whose imaging engine the K200 is based.

That said, the K200D is a superb camera, my Dad recently got one with the 18-55 Mk2 and it is excellent. I wont be trading in my K10D for one, but if I were just starting out it's probably the body I'd go for.

Don't forget as well that the K200D can use any K mount Auto Focus lens with no restrictions, many manual focus lenses with only slight restrictions and if you're willing to resort to stop down metering it'll take anything that fits in the hole. The same cannot be said of Nikons low end cameras (D40 and D60) which lack an auto focus motor and so cannot focus Nikons own earlier AF lenses.

K200D is just in a different class than the Nikon D40, the extra £75 will be money very well spent.

Ooo now I'm jealous! the DA is certainly better than the FA for DSLRs. I didn't know you had the DA and just didn't want to see you sell a good lens and regret it later.

If I didn't already have one, I'd buy the FA from you, it's a very fine lens for its time and price.

You do realise that the FA 28-80 and 80-320 lenses will be fully compatible with your new DSLR right? The 28-80 is probably not that useful a range on a 1.5x crop DSLR, but the 80-320 is a reasonable long telephoto and works perfectly with any K mount camera including the K20D.

I imagine you know this already, but I wouldn't want you to suddenly discover it after the lens was sold and kick yourself.

that depends on what you want.

The Macro ratio notation, 1:2, 1:1 and so on, refers to image size on film. Therefore, strictly speaking, the crop factor has no influence on macro ratios.

If you're more interested in how close you need to get to fill the frame with a given beastie, then of course it's a different story.

I have the Tamron you mention, and for general close ups of butterflies and the like it is superb. I have only used my 2x converter to get 1:1 2 or 3 times.


If you're buying the lens for full on true macro it's best to have either the extension tube or the matched 2x converter, if its really just for close ups of little things then you'll probably be fine without.

You've had loads of good advice on cameras and lenses already so I'll leave that subject alone, and offer you what tips I can on Linux photo software.

There are a few of us on here who photo edit in the free (software) world. I use the following software and while I don't claim any major expertise, it seems to work for me:

General Editing: GIMP - Whatever distro you're on, you probably already have this. Make sure you get the latest version 2.6. TBH, even on windows I consider GIMP to be the best editor available bar Photoshop CS. Certainly it's the best value for money!!

RAW photo processing: RAWTherapee - This is closed source, but free in the sense of free beer so one out of two aint bad! If you are a more dedicated free software person, you might like UFRAW which I used until recently and still use for Astronomy since it has a separate dark frame subtraction step.

Noise Reduction: Neat image under WINE. I used to use Noise Ninja, which is also excellent and is available as a Linux native program, but I lost my license code in a re-format.

Colour Management: ArgyllCMS and a Pantone Huey. Don't underestimate the importance of this if you want to print your pictures or display them on other monitors than your own. I recently replaced my monitor and the difference is amazing.

for a 300mm on a normal (non-tracking) tripod, thats pretty darned good!

you can use a T mount adaptor to fit just about any SLR to just about any telescope. Certainly any 'scope which can use a 2" eyepiece is easy, but even 1-1/4" adaptors are available.

may or may not matter to you, but my girlfriends Seagate Freeagent flat out refuses to mount on either of my Ubuntu Linux machines.

I recently got a Western Digital Passport drive at work. It runs off bus power, so no need for an extra power brick and it is very quick on a USB 2.0 port. Don't know if it suffers from the same bizzare mounting problem as the Seagate since I haven't tried it on Linux, but under Windows it works perfectly.

I approached both separately, then my camera and my telescope got talking one night, mugged me and stole my wallet.....