The 35 1.8 that was rumoured by someone on DPReview would be nice, and if Nikon can do it on APS-C (when they, like Canon, have a vested interest in upselling people to FF) then Pentax who have declared themselves to be an APS-C company should be able to do it even better. Just PLEASE Pentax don't put an SDM motor in it!

The variety of bodies aren't so much of a big deal (unless you are on a tight budget and thus need something in the sub-£400 range which Pentax no longer provide) - after all once you buy a body you keep using it until it drops or you change system. The Kx is very good indeed, the K7 is good and will be very good indeed if the rumoured 'K7s' with the Kx's high ISO performance materialises).

I wouldn't worry too much about Pentax's market longevity: their market share has actually gone up noticeably in the past year particularly in Japan (because of the Kx). Even if they were to have some problem, or Hoya got bored of them, they would be a prime* acquisition for a company wanting to get a foothold in the DSLR market the way Sony did with Minolta. Personally if this happens my bet would be on Kodak - buying the rights to a DSLR system which is called 'K mount' would be their marketing folks' dream right?

Baseless speculation aside, Pentax makes a decent profit (IIRC) so I can't see them being in any danger in the near future. In fact with the 645D looking like a reasonably-priced (and therefore, one would assume, relatively well-selling) alternative to the Hasselblad (bear in mind that my knowledge and interest in Medium Format could be written on the back of an electron) Pentax's business prospects are actually looking better than they were a year and a bit ago.

*Sorry, the awful pun was entirely intentional

I use Lightroom for my RAW processing, so once I've fiddled with presets to my heart's content I use Lightroom in much the same role as Picasa used to perform for my digital compact JPEGs.

The Canon and Nikon 50 1.4s are both under £300, whereas (again, excepting the current exceptional SRS sale) the Pentax is over £400.

The only reason I used the FA 1.4 as the 'fast fifty' price is that there simply is no other fast prime available. If they were to announce this rumoured cheap 35 1.8 at whatever photo show is coming up (bear in mind that I'm just repeating a rumour I read on another forum!) then that would of course be rectified assuming it wasn't £600.

Although Sony aren't great on price they do for example have a fast fifty, and a fast 'normal' APS-C lens for under £200 each. Still, with my experience of Sony's product reliability (specifically a Vaio laptop) I'd sooner take photographs with a box of crayons than a Sony camera

Obviously different systems have different lenses, but my point was about the system's prices in general: on Canikon (more so on Canon, given Nikon's baffling screw drive decision a few years back) there are a fair number of very reasonably priced prime lenses, whereas on Pentax (supposedly the "prime person's system") the cheapest is the 40mm limited at £350.

Put simply what I'm thinking about is the lenses I'm likely to want to buy in future: an f2-or-less lens for low light, an ultrawide, and a normalish prime. On those lenses alone (in fact, just about on the ultrawide alone - £890 for the Pentax 12-24mm vs £520 for the arguably superior Tokina 11-16 or £650ish for the Canon 10-22) going with Canon would save enough money that the body would instantly pay for itself.

Well, the limited prospects of the price hikes being reversed has gotten me extremely depressed about Pentax as a whole. In one of my idle moments I checked out the Canon lens listings on Warehouse Express. All of the sort of lenses we lack - a 28mm f2.8, a cheap fast fifty, a 35mm f2, are available for less than £250 on Canon. On our system, on the other hand, the first and last of these no longer exist while the latter is only available in 50 1.4 guise for north of £400 (current SRS sale notwithstanding). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my K20D and the images I can create with it and my current small flock of lenses, but in a few years when it needs replaced I honestly can't see myself sticking with Pentax.

The K20D (I notice in your sig you have one) is known to underexpose though, not sure that can be blamed on the lens

SRS have the DA-L one (which IIRC is the same as the others except no quick shift focus) for £25 brand new if that helps - or they have the new Weather Resistant version for £79 again brand new.

The Sigma 50 shares this characteristic - the assumption (from either Photozone or DPReview, whichever reviewed that lens) of the lens designers seems to be that portrait lenses are generally used wide open for background-blurring purposes and thus stopped-down performance is much less important. That's the idea anyway - I don't pretend to be a portrait photographer of any great skill so it might not be an accurate assumption.

EDIT: That Photozone review (of the Samyang) seems to suggest that it actually needs to be stopped down to f4 to compete with Canon's lenses.

On second thoughts you needn't take any notice of that. I've just noticed the price these are going for new nowadays and realised how far south of the mark I was! Deleted the PM in case its absence is puzzling you.

Offer PM'd re:35