surely you might as well say the same about mileage on a car. The cam belt COULD snap after 100 yards, it's a lot more likely after 70,000 miles though.

unless I am much mistaken, the P simply stands for Pentax.

All Pentax lenses since the introduction of the K mount are either

SMC Pentax -(series designator) (Lens name)

or

Pentax - (Series designator) (lens name)

if they lack the SMC coating. (this is rare, I only know of 5 or 6 examples across all series).

So correctly all FA lenses are SMCPFA lenses, but mostly we get lazy and just refer to FA lenses.

[quote="Pentax guy on LL"]Therefore we plan to release soon a new wide high-end lens that will complement our existing wide lineup and be able to fully realize the image quality potential of the sensor for wide applications. It is also going to restore some of the wide capability that we have lost because of the smaller size of the sensor used in the 645D compared to 645 film.

[/quote]so that lens we saw pictures of IS a wide angle, and from the last sentance probably wider than 35mm.

never have I seen a better example of an oportunity to share

The first thing I would do is secure a good monitor with a SIPS or PVA pannel. Then buy/build the fastest well ballanced box you can with the remaining money from your budget. The monitor is the most important component in a photo editing PC by a mile, nothing else matters even half as much.

If you want to use the graphics card to do GPGPU processing for Photoshop, go for an NVidia Geforce based card with as many Stream Processors as possible. The ATI/AMD cards can theoretically do GPGPU stuff but it's no where near as mature at this point.

in fairness I only have 2x converters, you might do better with a 1.4x

I shot a lot of film before going digital. I've got to say though, about 90% of what I know about photography I learned with a DSLR.

The instant feedback makes learning a LOT easier IMO.

my 80-320 isn't too sharp at the long end to begin with, I have tried it with a converter but the results weren't up to much.

I suspect there have been several of these, but I used to have a Tamron 28-80 Aspherical on an MZ-50 film camera. It wasn't unusably bad, but nothing to get excited about. A fairly average film era kit lens, my general impression was that it wasn't quite as good as the Pentax FA28-80 which came with the MZ series, though I never did anything aproaching a scientific test to back that up.

LALALALA I can't hear you, I don't need to upgrade my standard prime.......

it's certainly quite an old design, I got mine with an old Practica along with a Sonar 135 f/3.5. Mine is the later MC version which is supposed to be the best.

This chap over on dpreview is using the same lens
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1036&message=30168933

I haven't seen any side by side comparisons between a Flek and a more modern 35, but the Flek is good enough for me for now.