Might be me living up to my username, but most tripods are a lot bulkier and heavier than my Sigma 10-20

This place really is terrible for LBA. I'd all but dismissed the 18-135 (on the basis that I'd rather wait and get the FA77), and then this thread comes up. Since I'm possibly going on holiday at some point, I'm coming round to the view that the 18-135 would be the perfect complement to my Sigma 10-20 (with, possibly, the DA Limited along for the ride) as a compact [ie hand luggage-able] city holiday kit. Damn you all!

I think the * zooms have bigger issues than the 18-135. Like SDM failures and being built squint, to name two

A quick bit of advice on fast primes:

*35mm f1.8: there isn't one, you must be thinking of Nikon. Pentax instead has a 35mm f2.4, which is nearly a stop slower and has no silent focusing motor but costs more than the Nikon. However it is still a very nice lens indeed (very sharp at all apertures, and nice bokeh), despite being the lowest priced Pentax lens (other than the 18-55/50-200 'kit lenses')

*In terms of used 50mm lenses, the f1.7 is supposed to be sharper than the f1.4 (in both F and FA variants) but the prices on eBay are ridiculous now

*For new lenses, the Pentax FA 50mm f1.4 is less sharp wide open (like most fast lenses) but has nice bokeh and is sharp at smaller apertures

*The Sigma 50mm f1.4 costs about £60 more than the Pentax FA, but has a silent focusing motor and is much sharper wide open. However it is much bigger/heavier, and you also might need to exchange it five times to get one that doesn't have focusing problems!

*The Pentax DA*55mm f1.4 is about £550 (or was, the last time I checked). In my opinion it isn't worth the extra money compared to the Pentax FA or the Sigma, however those who have the DA*55 tend to love it and it is also weather resistant (but this only matters if you have a weather resistant camera like the K20D, K7, K5).

Even Canon's 100-400 is £1300, which means about 2 grand in Pentax prices

Could I play Devil's Advocate here? The reason people have been able to buy MIJ FA43s while the FA31 and FA77 are now AIV could be that the FA43 sells fewer copies than the other two (it certainly gets less hype, despite being a stellar lens) and consequently shops/distributors have yet to run out of their stocks of MIJ.

Owning a building which happens to feature in a photograph does not give a person any right to order the photograph destroyed or to prevent its publication. Even if the photographer is trespassing, the landowner's only remedy is to eject them (and seek legal redress for the trespass). The only person with any rights over a photograph is the photographer, unless he/she has agreed to transfer the rights to someone else.

The portraits I've taken with mine have this indefinable 'sparkle' about them - though there's plenty of detail there (my other primes are the 50 Macro and 100 Macro, so I'm not exactly sharpness-deprived ). Not sure how helpful such waffle is to the OP, but I think this lens is certainly the exemplar of the modern 'Pentax look'.

And that's from a softly-softly 'review' on the Other Forum which deliberately avoided mention of barrel distortion (traditionally the weakest point of superzooms).

It makes you wonder about the quality department that approved underpowered SDM motors, and then approved a higher-than-usual proportion of squint lenses in the two DA* zooms with the result that the underpowered SDM motors were even more likely to fail? When your customers are buying Sigma lenses rather than your premium line to get better QC something is badly, badly wrong.