Is it a sign of photo-nerdism that the first thing I noticed about the polar bears' football was its Carl Zeiss lens?

It isn't necessary to learn how to use all of it to get a great deal out of Lightroom. In fact 90% of my processing is done using a set of presets I got from the Other Forum - I've been using Lightroom for nearly two years and there are some controls I still haven't touched

I've got the Lightroom 3 trial installed, and in most cases the performance didn't seem that much different from Lightroom 2. However the rendering of images (when clicking on one in filmstrip view) was noticeably slower - and it wasn't a memory issue as I had plenty spare according to Task Manager (LR3 was actually using significantly less memory than LR2).

Since the actual image rendering doesn't seem to be different - at least not for images from my K20D - I'm not sure whether I'll upgrade. Noise reduction isn't that important to me (I have ISO1600 graduation photos of myself in a black robe, and the LR2, unreduced noise doesn't bother me on an 8x10 print) and though the easy watermarking is nice I already have a (slightly cumbersome) LR2 plugin which does it.

The one thing to bear in mind though is that (at least according to the font of all human knowledge) the DNG conversion process doesn't preserve 100% of the original image for some RAW formats.

Whatever the truth of that, shooting in PEF and then converting to DNG is probably a better option than shooting in DNG: on the K20D at least (this may have changed on later models) PEF files are [losslessly] compressed while DNG files are not - leading to higher file sizes (whereas the Adobe converter will apply lossless compression to its DNG files).

Yeah, but the student version of LR3 is 'only' £10 cheaper than the upgrade version. I'd probably get the upgrade version simply to avoid the hassle of having to fax documents to Adobe - I once had to do this with Macromedia Studio (when Adobe had bought them but Macromedia still existed as a separate brand) and it was a real annoyance. Before anyone points it out, yes I know they have an email option But I'm certainly not sending scans of my student ID and proof of address over unencrypted email!

Use this site:

http://www.dutycalculator.com/

Then add on £8 for Royal Mail's ransom fee (they pay the taxes on your behalf - without your consent - and then charge you for the privilege).

I was thinking about upgrading my hard drive in the new year, so the thought had occurred to me that upgrading the memory at the same time would be a sensible thing to do. If I go down that route I can get a Windows 7 64-bit upgrade cheap because I'm a student - however I'm loathe to do that given my paranoia about system temperature in particular. I'll probably install the Lightroom 3 demo - if I can get performance roughly equivalent to LR2 out of it then I'll be happy.

I suppose the reason why Pentax don't make a long telephoto is because it would never be enough. Say they make a 400mm f5.6 prime (hypothetical choice because Canon's is reasonably-priced, and it fits in the line of 200 f2.8, 300 f4 as we have now) - this wouldn't help those who (like Mike) feel that 500mm on the Bigma sometimes isn't enough. Absent a massive Manchester City-scale takeover by a company wanting to take on the long tele market, Pentax wouldn't produce enough to stop long tele people going to Canon anyway so perhaps they have decided making an attempt isn't worth the cost.

I currently use Lightroom 2 for my RAW processing, and was considering the upgrade to Lightroom 3 given its noise reduction capabilities in particular. However I'm a bit concerned about the performance I'm likely to get. While my computer has a quad-core processor, it only has 2Gb of RAM which isn't as much as it used to be! Can any fellow Lightroomers reassure me about the performance of version 3 as compared to version 2?

PS: Realise there's a demo, but would rather avoid the monumental hassle of installing that until I know it's likely to work

The FA43 has the focal length it does because 43mm (rather than 50mm) was the true 'normal' lens (focal length = diagonal of format) on 35mm format.