Hmm.. could be a very useful lens given its range at the longer end - in an urban walkabout the other night (pics coming soon) I never felt like using anything longer than 35mm (I had my Sigma 10-20, DA35 M, and Samsung 100 M with me). Ultrawide to normal is a pretty good urban/landscape lens - though I wouldn't be interested as I love my Sigma 10-20 too much. My only concern is whether a 3x zoom ratio on an ultrawide lens is too ambitious, and will lead to optical flaws.

I also think the Other Forum are being optimistic in their predictions:

They have seen what Pentax charges for the non-WR, non-silent AF, DA 12-24 haven't they? If this is under £700 (the going rate for the DA*16-50) I'll be astounded.

Not hard to afford stuff when you've got 50-odd million 'subjects' paying for it for you. (/end politics)

Having seen the formal shot uncropped I still like it - it's also refreshing to see an official photographer not slavishly following the rule of thirds to the detriment of the photograph's purpose (Obama's official photo was hopeless composition-wise, though technically first class)

The closeup: maybe he forgot to bring his flash with him, and so couldn't compensate for the outdoors being much brighter Definitely don't like it - not a stickler for technical aspects in photos (and not claiming I could do better!) but the massively blown out background ruins the photograph IMHO. Possibly he was trying to make it look 'dreamy' and romantic, but it just looks dreadful.

Quite like the other one though, as far as formal portraits go. Composition was my only nitpick but it seems from above posts that the BBC have cropped both shots - in which case why bother featuring the photographs at all? A picture of a packet of biscuits would have as much to do with the photograph the photographer actually took.

It can work well with landscapes, and can also work well for indoor scenes where the outside is much brighter (i.e. sunny day) to avoid whiteout windows. However, exposing for the outside and using a flash/diffuser to make up the difference tends to work better in the latter case.

Not when the clouds are blown out in the original RAW, they don't.

Going purely by reputations, the Tamron 90 is actually supposed to be slightly sharper than the DFA100, with the DFA100 being slightly sharper stopped down. The differences in both cases are, however, negligible.

Don't do it - the DFA WR isn't worth the loss of those two lenses (particularly the Viv, since it essentially replaces the DFA). The bokeh on it isn't that much better - just buy a polybag to put on the DFA-normal when it rains

In other words, ward them off with repeated pokes of a long bargepole unless they've mistakenly got Pentax kit at a silly price?

They still haven't recalled the 16-50 and 50-135, despite their tendency to be built squint and thus burn out their SDM motors. How many years have those lenses been out again?

IMHO, for basic photo editing Paint.net beats Gimp hands-down. It's only on Windows of course, which is its only disadvantage.

Wonder if they would pricematch Microglobe?

And the Sony models which have it apparently suffer from crippling ghosting issues too.