On rare occasions I've seen 50 F1.7s sell for more than Chris is selling brand new F1.4s.

People assume that Ebay=Cheap, and it only takes two idiots to start a bidding war which ends higher than the new price.


I was looking for a clapped out old laptop for a project a couple of months ago. All I wanted was a Pentium or better with a working screen, but every vaguely working lappy on ebay goes for £100+, and several of the broken ones got near to £100.

I rarely visit ebay anymore, you have to spend hours wading through overpriced junk and BIN listings with huge postage from HK to find the few remaining good deals. It isn't worth it.

that What The Duck is proof even Canon users produce good art sometimes

having thought a great deal about this, I'm going to go with two cameras:

My Dad's old Pentax MV, and my Ricoh KR-5 Super II.


The MV was the first SLR I ever used. Dad had upgraded to a P30T so it was redundant, and I started using it on occasional days out. I didn't really understand what I was doing, but it was clear to me even then that this camera was capable of so much more than my old compact. I took it with me on my school German exchange. One of my enduring memories of that trip is the tour guide at one of Ludwig IIIs castles telling us we could take photos if we liked but no flash was allowed. I had anticipated this and loaded 800ISO film and a 50mm F2 prime. The look on her face was a picture as I simply removed the flash gun and kept on shooting

Fast forward 5 years and I'm at university. By this time I own a Pentax MZ-7, but it holds tremendous sentimental value and I am not prepared to risk it in student digs. I keep seeing photos I want to take but I have no camera which is up to the task. Eventually a friend of mine produces an ME-Super and I decide to get a second hand SLR, one cheap enough that I can risk keeping it at uni. Ebay provided a Ricoh KR-5 Super II with 50mm F1.9 Chinon lens for £30. It was all mechanical with simple traffic light metering, but I learned a lot on that old camera.


Neither of these is particularly iconic for the world at large, but they introduced me to the delights of SLR photography and for that I am eternally in their debt.

Neat looking prize they have there, I could certainly do with a flashy new tripod, but was anyone else disappointed to discover there was no photography involved in entering?

Hello and welcome,

the problem you are going to hit with old wide angles is that they are generally not that wide on crop frame DSLRs like the K100D. You've got to get down to 20mm or shorter to give yourself any sort of wide perspective with the K100D, and in old lenses that's very hard to do.

I believe there was a K series 15mm, but these are rare and expensive.

You are probably better off going for something modern like the Sigma 10-20 zoom.

you obviously haven't seen the 55-300 yet, I will be very surprised if anyone who owns one ever sells it lol.

The slide out bit is so you can get to polarisers to rotate them without having to take the hood off.

You may already know this but if you hit the OK button when zoomed in on an image, it zooms all the way out.

Not a great help, but makes switching between images on cameras other than the K10 and K20 a little easier.

Actually it works with several buttons, I just like to use OK because it doesn't do anything sinister if I'm already zoomed all the way out.

interesting feature. I might have picked a less lurid colour, but it certainly makes them stand out.

forbidden here too, Firefox 2.

On another note, how come Johns first post on this thread is on a green background?

the great thing about true macro lenses (read prime lenses which focus to at least 1:2 without any extra adapters) is that I've never heard of a bad one. Some are better than others, but even the cheapest of the cheap like niblue's Cosina are optically very good.