perfect, thanks guys I'll have a play later on, perhaps I can stave off the urge to buy a K5-II for a few more months!

let's be fair, Pentax was originally the name of an SLR produced by the Asahi company, now it's effectively the name of a DSLR produced by Ricoh.

for some reason I initially read the last word of this post as shorts

it hadn't occured to me until now that this might be the same issue, but mine also jams against the stop trying to focus past infinity on my 16-45 at 16.

that's actually less than I remember it being the last time we decided "stuff that for a game of soldiers, we'll walk"

If you do ever drag the youngsters up the proper way, don't be tempted to encourage them with promisses of an ice cream in the cafe at the top. My parents tried that one and were dismayed to find that the top 100ft of the mountain was under 6 feet of snow, so the cafe was closed.

I have an increasing nagging feeling that my trusty if somewhat aged K10D is back-focussing (not sure I have the terms the right way around, I mean it's focussing further away than the subject actually is).

I seem to recall there used to be a way to get the K10D into an advanced debug mode which allowed focus adjustment, does anyone have any links to the best (read easiest and least risky) way to do this?

it will do on an MZ, because aperture control from the body is a feature common to lens and body.

The Z's and non-crippled MZ's are basically the pinicle of compatibility, they can use any lens in any mode.

My Dad and I spent the whole night out watching the Leonids one year, with 2 DSLRs, 4 35mm SLRs and a 120 folder. We saw hundreds of shooting stars and got exactly one frame with one in it.

The one and only shot with a meteor trail in it was taken as it was getting light and we were packing up. I decided to take a silluette of one of the cameras on a tripod against brightening eastern sky, no thought of meteors in my mind at this point. When I developed the RAW, voila, one Meteor trail directly above the camera.

Sometimes you don't get anything until you stop trying.

a good point, my caveat about crippled mount cameras should have included lenses as well.

Interestingly the aperture ring less lenses do meter correctly on an ME, they're just always at minimum aperture so not practically useful.

In fact you can go a lot further than that, I've used my FA 80-320 on my K1000 with good results, and a friend of mine mounted my 18-55 on his p30, albeit with some slightly crazy vignetting at the wide end. Any K mount camera and lens combo gives all features common to both parts ( with some exceptions for crippled mounts on late film bodies and dslrs)