the 200 M series I have is so so at F4 but sharpens up quite nicely at F8. Nice enough for my amateurish eyes anyway.

I've never used the Tamron, but I have the 80-320

my impression of it is that it is very good up to about 250 as long as you stop down a bit. At 320 even F8 is a little on the soft side and displays what I can only descibe as colour leakage. I hesitate to call it chromatic aberation and its not really PF, but it ends up with halos around bright areas. Doesn't notice too much if you don't blow the shots up, but it annoys me. I tend to use an SMC-M 200 F4 on a 2x converter for really long shots.

After a weeks hiking and photography in south Wales, my Dad and I are considering the lowepro S+F harness as an improvement to our current rigs (consisting of a padded workbelt with toploader bags attached).

Lowepro claim that it can only be used with their deluxe belt, which at £30 for something we essentially already have seems a bit steep. Does anyone have one of these harnesses and do you know if it would attach sensibly to a normal padded toolbelt?

cheers all

so you wont be needing that 300 A* F4 anymore then? I'm sure I could see my way clear to disposing of it for you, and at no charge too........

I find the effect of the UV "protective" filter varies from lens to lens. I'm not sure why this should be, but my SMC-FA 80-320 and Tamron 90 F2.5 seem to particularly hate them, while most of my other lenses only suffer from problems in extreme conditions.

I suspect what we have here is a classic case of unit confusion

The images you are taking are 10 megapixels. After JPEG compression they take up around 2.4MB of storage space.


K10D RAW files come in at around 9-11MB, but this is pure coincidence and has little to do with them being 10MP photos. It is well worth getting into RAW processing for the increased flexibility, but it wont give you any more pixels to play with.


In order to use your old lenses you will need to set the custom function which allows use of the aperture ring. This has been discussed at length on these forums before so a quick search should bring up all the info you need.

the Pentax DA 16-45 is the obvious choice, you'll probably need to add some to what you get for the DS, but it's a fine standard lens.

one more vote for Raw

if you auto convert your raws you get back to what you would have had if you'd shot JPEG in the first place

If you take some time to get your head around Raw processing you get more options. you can't loose.

I have the Pentax FA 80-320. At 320 wide open it isn't that good, but backed off and stopped down a bit it's capable of some pretty good results. I've never used any of the others to compare it to.

as a veteran of a number of forums covering various topics over the last 10 years, I can honestly say this is just about as relaxed and friendly as they come.

The mods here do a very good job, I applaud them.