With prices like that, I'd be either finding the extra £90 for the DA* or going with the tried and true 16-45.


Not knocking Chris at all, he's got to make a profit which limits what he can do and his prices are always well bellow SRP, but the 17-70 is going to have to do something pretty amazing to command a price so close to that of the 16-50.

It will certainly be interesting to see how it performs, but provisionally I'm with Iceblinker, the price is too high.

Of the lenses you mention, the two FA series ones are probably the kit which came with the Z-20. Both are probably passable if in good condition, the 28-80 is worth very little, the 80-200 maybe as much as £50 but probably no more, depending on exactly which one it is.

The 50mm and 200mm M series lenses are quite good pieces of glass, the 50 in particular. You will have to use them in stop down metering with the K10. Perhaps £35 for the 200 and £50 for the 50, but I'm a little out of date.

The Z-20 is an early 90s AF film SLR body. It's quite handy if you want an AF AE film SLR but worth next to nothing.

The 135 F2.5 Tak Bayonet is one of a very few Pentax lenses which are not SMC coated. If it's Japanese made, then it may actually be pretty good but it's very prone to flare, ghosting and loss of contrast if you let the sun get anywhere near its front element. For this reason, it's worth no more than £10 but helpful if you need a fast telephoto prime on a budget.

The ME winder is a power winder for the M series and A series cameras, it doesn't match any of the other things you mention.

the Zeiss Flek makes a nice wandering around standard lens does it not? I have one which I haven't used for a while, might have to break it out.

Thanks Nimitz,

yes I was very pleased with #1. As I said it was a pretty dull day so I was forced to use fairly high ISOs to get a workable shutter speed. I think it was about 560. In retrospect I would have been better off without the 2x converter since getting close to the critters generally wasn't a problem, but once I was inside I was unwilling to change lenses because of the very humid atmosphere.

The noise seems to show up more in these web sized versions than in the full size. I always find post processing noise reduction is a difficult ballance between killing the noise and making the image look "plastic". As you can see I haven't mastered it yet!

cheers guys. I would love to go back with the Kiron, preferably on a brighter day. The SR was struggling a bit with the concept of 1/20th at 180mm a few inches from the subject. That combined with the obvious difficulties of focusing accurately at these distances hand held made for a pretty low hit rate of shots which were both in focus and shake free.

I went to visit my Sister in Aberystwyth over Bank Holiday weekend. Of course it rained most of the time, so we went to the Butterfly House just outside the town. It's very small but has quite a collection, so I was able to have some fun with my K10D and Tamron 90mm SP + 2x TC.







I'm sorry, I don't know these guys names. They were taken at ~ F8 and 1/20th, hand held with SR on.

That seems much more reasonable, and as you say, good riddance to the tit-for-tat sellers.

appologies for my previous over reaction I'm under a bit of stress at the moment and tending to snap at things I wouldn't normally snap at.

I hope you're right, but I don't think eBay have a great deal of interest in keeping the private sellers. The amount of revenue generated by someone such as myself engaging in ~90 transactions over the last 5 years must be miniscule compared to the big sellers for whom eBay trading is the day job.

It makes no difference to them if I never sell another item, as long as people like me are still around to buy the items offered by the big sellers. Hence they are tayloring the rules to favour small buyers and big sellers.

Thanks for the heads up Steve.

Looks like private selling on Ebay will shortly be a thing of the past