in all fairness, f/8 before blackout is pretty darned good for an old/cheap screen, ME-F doesn't do any better than that.

Can't you focus wide open and just stop down to shoot?

similar shape to my Tamron 300 2.8, yes I'd go along with "funny looking"!

K10D you clearly aren't getting any use out of that M*, obviously must be rubbish, let me take it to the tip for you.......

I had a Vivitar 28-70 3.5-4.5 for a while, but mine was Manual focus, not sure if they would be the same. "Macro" meant 1:4 so nothing to write home about, but useful occasionally. Overall it was a nice lens, nothing special, but nothing wrong with it either.

Vivitar never made lenses, they always bought them in from other people so the one you've seen may not even have been made by the same people as mine was, but if it is the same then it's worth a punt at £20.

M42 mount didn't originally incorporate the ability for cameras to automatically stop down the lens, so you have to do it manually. Later lenses have an "Auto/Manual" switch which essentially does the same thing, except that in "Auto" mode the lens stays open until a little pin on the mount is pressed by the camera to stop it down.

Oddly, this property if anything makes them easier to use on current DSLRs since you can stick the camera in Av mode and control the aperture with the switch.

MZ7 is uncrippled, actually it's just about the least crippled camera Pentax have ever made, the only thing it can't do is power zoom. I thought the manual called it KAF2 but Bojidar has it listed as KAF so my bad on that one.

Interesting that the MZ-10 has PZ where the more expensive and otherwise higher speced 7 does not.

what, both of them?

I think we'd be the ones hiding in the pub with the Sony and Leica users! [/quote]fixed it for you

I would argue that this

http://www.theonion.com/

is the online version of The Onion. Actually, I didn't know there was an Offline version!

I miss SatireWire.

maybe it was a tame lion which he paid the local zoo for use of?

I've not really used my 35-70 on digital, but my experience of it on film is that it's better than you might expect for a kit lens. The short zoom ratio allows it to have relatively few compromises, and of course its tiny size cannot be overlooked.