/me puts on black outfit and picks up bag marked "swag"

where did you say you live again?

You sir, are a genius, why have I never thought of this? My SMC F 35-70 just got promoted to my main camera bag! That should deal with my focal length gap between the 16-45 and 80-320!

you could be right there John, it would hardly be unprecedented.

My understanding is that there's a digital pin which was added to the mount for the F-series, which allows communication between the camera processor and a chip in the lens. The earlier lenses actually don't have chips at all, they just have pins which are connected to ground or not and the combination of connections encodes the characteristics of the lens.

It's entirely possible that some late A series lenses actually have the digital version of the mount if they were introduced after the F series was created, I'm thinking mainly of lenses intended for use with the MZ-M?

I know that some late M-Series lenses actually have the aperture stop down mechanism which was introduced for the A series.

We're all old enough to know that rules often don't hold 100%, but generally I'd expect an A series lens to need a focal length set, and an F series lens to set it automatically.

this isn't a camera capability as such, other than requiring there to be a protocol for remotely controlling the camera from a computer.

Pentax used to have such a protocol in the K10D and earlier, I don't know if it has been maintained and updated in the later models. There is also the question of weather this protocol is published for others to use in add-on devices.

Thereafter it's up to the good people at CamRanger to support or not a given camera, and at the moment they seem to have chosen to concentrate on Canikon, for annoying but obvious reasons.

the A series lenses don't know their focal length so they will ask for focal length. It's only the F series and later which have the necessary chip inside to report their focal length to the camera.

if you want to use the SR and have it as effective as possible you need to put in the focal length you are using. Most Macro zooms will only go into "Macro" at one focal length (either full wide or full tele). I've not used the SMC-A 35-70 so not sure, but I'd guess you'll be at 70mm when doing "macro" with it.

my current home laptop is a 5 year old Core Duo running Ubuntu 12.04, the screen is dieing now and that will probably be what kills it, either that or 30Meg raw files if I manage to convince my wife to let me have a K-5II

of course, all this gubbins is also why when I go somewhere where I will be really upset if I come back with no shots, I pick up my "emergency" camera bag.

It contains a K1000, SMC-A 50mm f/1.7 and 2 rolls of film.

I once agreed to takes some pictures of stained glass to help a friend with her PhD research. We arranged access to the building on a specific day when the building was closed to the public so we could get up close without being in anyones way, turned up, introduced ourselves, were shown to the windows in question and.....no card in camera.

Thankfully the man upstairs was smiling on me that day and two cards which I thought I'd lost turned up in the top pocket of my camera bag, otherwise it would have been deeply embarrassing .

My home monitor is a 19" HP with a PVA panel, since I couldn't afford the cash or the space for a SIPS when I bought it.

At work I use twin Dell 24", and I must agree with the above comments re: two monitors, I wouldn't go back for serious work now.