Make sure you get professional indemnity insurance too. To put it simply public liability is to cover you for accidents (e.g. someone trips over your camera bag and breaks their leg, a tripod falls onto a kids head etc.) whereas professional indemnity is to cover failing to do the job for whatever reason (memory card fails, illness, forget to do an agreed shot etc.)

Veering towards the K30 again, because it turns out that MJPEG is what I thought: file sizes 500Mb per minute at 1080p . I mean I know card space is cheap but uploading that to Youtube ain't gonna be much fun. I do have a question about build quality which hopefully proud owners can answer: reviewers make much of the K30 being a polycarbonate shell on a metal frame, as opposed to the alloy body of the K5 and its siblings. Am I not right in thinking though that the K20D uses a polycarbonate shell/metal chassis construction? My K20D is built like a tank, so if the K30 is 'only' built with that method then it should be OK right?

Summary: someone please send a horse's head to whoever at Pentax decided not to bother putting a ten quid h264 encoder into the K5 II

The good thing about the dilemma is that I'm choosing between two Pentax cameras: I'd been very seriously considering an E-PL5 until (for the first time in a while) I had an opportunity to take some photos with my K20D and DA35M. That convinced me that whatever camera I end up getting has to be K-mount.

I've now changed my mind about 4 times regarding this deal. I was fairly set on a K5 II because low light AF is the one big improvement I'd like over my K20D (the other improvements are more nice-to-haves). But getting a K30 with weather sealing and dual dials (but no top screen) for less than half the price? I had just about settled this in favour of the K5 II (even deleting my original post on this topic about 10 mins ago) when I found out that for reasons best known to themselves Pentax have not added the K30's h264 video support to the K5 II. The Panasonic superzoom I had immediately before my K20D took M-JPEG videos. What resulted were fairly big files that weren't very compatible: if I remember correctly Premiere Elements did open them, but only grudgingly.

So now I"m back to square one - can anyone with a K30 already tell me what the low light AF is like? I'm not bothered so much about the K5 II's improved ability to find focus in complete darkness. I'd just rather that whatever new camera I end up with doesn't have the same tendency of my K20D to blatantly fib about having locked focus when presented with indoor lighting

The Sigma 8-16mm has their new FLD glass in it (it stands for 'F Low Dispersion', no really ). This apparently makes it beastly sharp: at 8mm wide open it outresolves the Canon 50D's 15mp sensor in the centre (http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/515-sigma816f4556apsc?start=1).

I have the 10-20mm, and it's plenty sharp for my liking (it's also my most-used lens). I can see why others might not like it though: the corners at 10mm are weird (don't know whether it's lack of resolution, distortion, or whatever), and it isn't exactly the most petite lens. But let me put it this way: I've grown sufficiently attached to it that it's currently one of my three lens kit, despite my love of Limited primes.

As far as the original topic is concerned, I'd rent the 12-24. I use the 10-20 at its longer end quite a lot (not as much as 10mm though, hence no DA15 yet ), so I imagine the extra reach (of the 12-24 vs the 8-16) at the long end might be quite useful. I definitely wouldn't get the 8-16 (as my only lens) for that reason.

It seems the predictions that this was US only were premature. Has anyone looked at SRS's Pentax lens page?

Just as a taste, the 17-70 and DA70 (mentioning them as they're two I had been looking at so know the old price) have gone from £369.99 last week to £509.00 now. Unless this is a temporary thing, then the promise Pentax were showing (new ownership, new models, lens roadmap etc.) has just been killed stone dead. There have always been some lenses that were more expensive than equivalents on Canikon (the FA Limiteds for example), but now it seems Ricoh wants the whole range to look overpriced in comparison to the competition.

All, seemingly, to get more exposure in bricks-and-mortar stores which even those who aren't tech gear-heads (ie most of the buying public) don't shop in any more. Good luck with that: the slow death of Jessops, Game, and the like show that customers will increasingly use online reviews to get information about products, and then buy online. They won't pay over-the-odds for lenses just so that Pentax can get more involved in the last century's business model.

OK, rant over. Still love my K20D to death and wouldn't ever sell it, but I can't honestly see myself buying any new Pentax kit with these prices.

People elsewhere are getting fairly worked up about the bloke's answer to the inevitabe "FF question". Having read it a second time after a few hours, I am still at a loss to work out why. He essentially gives an extended, marketing-speak 'no comment'.

As far as the future health of Pentax is concerned, I do think the Ricoh sale will 'come good'. After all, Hoya only bought Pentax for the medical division, and would have been quite happy for the camera division to die had they been unable to offload it. I must admit that I have decided not to buy any Pentax kit for the forseeable future, but that's more from a "wait and see" point of view than any visions of imminent death of the system.

Ricoh didn't go to all the trouble and expense of buying Pentax to kill off its main product line. If they can avoid the track record of shambolic product launches over the last 18 months (K5 sensor stains, Kr front focusing, 18-135, Q), that will be an improvement. So maybe no news (of new products) is in this case good news since it lessens the risk of product development being rushed HoyaPentax-style.

EDIT: Who am I kidding? My problem is that, whatever issues I may have with the way Pentax has been recently, I absolutely love my K20D. Seriously considering adding an A 50mm f1.7 to my flock, despite already having two 50mm lenses (one of which is AF) and not really being very good at manual focus.

This. You need to have 'Allow aperture ring use' (or something to that effect) enabled in the custom settings menu.

Also, if you input the focal length it not only uses it for SR, it also (IIRC) records it in the image EXIF.

That story about the lens designer being 'fired' (can't remember his name, but he designed the FA Limiteds among others) was a mistake. The story was actually that he was 'leaving the company' because he was old (in other words, retiring) but this somehow got mistranslated from Japanese and became "LENS DESIGNER X FIRED!!!!!" on DPReview

The Other Place has some quite serious discussions about mounting Pentax's C-mount (security camera?) lenses on it because there are f1.0 zooms available.

I think price is the Q's fundamental problem: if it were half the price (ie the same price as cameras with similar image quality - midrange compacts) then it would make sense. With less money than the Q costs, one could buy an Olympus EPL1 and the Panasonic 20mm f1.7 pancake. Or for even less a Canon G11. Both of these beat the Q for image quality by some distance.

Was going to offer some choice quotes here but can't bring myself to do it. Poor little Q

I can't help but think that the Q is catastrophically overpriced: if Pentax were going to make a compact-sized, compact-IQ camera then it should have been compact-priced. It's a shame - I really do love it's adorableness.