if it hasn't had an impact on your pictures, why do you want to fiddle with it? Glass is coated for a good reason, removing the remaining coating will not do anything good.

I imagine the same reason I do

they are ~ 60% of the size of DNG files

/me hands Dan a ladder and holds his shovel while he climbs out of the hole

no worries mate, I'm not the type to take anything on an internet forum that way, I tend to imagine phraises such as "as you well know" being said in a mock scolding voice by default.

actually I'm quite flattered that you think I'm a competent photographer

you are quite right of course, pointing into the sun with a UV filter on is a recipe for all sorts of loss of contrast, ghosting and goodness knows what other evil nasties.

what gets to me, and the reason why I jumped up and down perhaps a nats more than I should have back then, is the insistance by some that the presence of a filter degrades the quality of the image regardless of the position of the sun. Technically it's true, place any real piece of glass in front of your lens and you will get refraction induced problems, but as long as those problems are less than one pixel across you'll never see them.

in theory, absolutely

in practice, I challenge you to show me a shot which exhibits this. Even pixel peeping a 100% shot with a cheap filter on a Zeiss lens I have never been able to find a loss of resolution.

now that's just crazy talk, but it might lift the poor Canons self esteem so that it can be as good as it can be.

oh certainly if you are using another filter then the UV/Skylight has to come off, that's a given.

Still I have never yet been able to observe a difference other than ghosting resistance even with my cheap-as-they-come Hama UV filters. Admittedly I don't own any * lenses, but I've tried it on my Zeiss Flek 35mm and Pentax 50mm primes.

in my experience skylight filters are so weak that it makes no noticable difference to the photo.

I have a UV or Skylight filter (whatever comes to hand) on my lenses most of the time for protection. It's remarkably close to impossible to get a Pentax SMC lens to flare or ghost even with a skylight filter on so unless I'm shooting straight at the sun I see no reason to take them off.

they look a bit plastic but as George says they are actually pretty solid. They sell so cheap mainly because they are quite large and ugly compared to most Pentax's and a lot of people don't know what they are/were.

A good choice as a starter SLR for someone on a budget. I had an SFX for a while and was always pleased with the results.

you can get a vague idea from the number of the photograph since it goes up by one each time. It's not foolproof as it can be reset and I think it resets to 0 after 10000 shots. Also if you use the in camera RAW development facility this increases the photo number as well.

hi Peter, glad to hear you now have a K10D which works! I am very much looking forward to seeing what you produce with it, having enjoyed the film shots you have posted in the past.