Just so you know, SRS have an offer on the FA 50 1.4 at the moment - instead of being £400-odd they have it for £299 and also have a £25 cashback offer (the code for it its on the lens page) which means you'd pay £274. I emailed them and the cashback offer finishes at the end of the month and the reduced price on the FA 50 is a "while stocks last" deal.

Heresy! Burn the witch!

If Pentax (or SRS) were to start offering an 'Xbox RROD'-style extended warranty on SDM failures I might think about it

Since I take a lot of portraits (well, 'posed photos of people', I know that some people have a narrow technical definition of portrait ) I was planning to make a 50mm f1.4 lens my next purchase. This used to be a no-brainer: the Sigma was £100 cheaper than the Pentax and sharper wide open. Now SRS have gone and reduced the Pentax FA in their sale to less than the price of the Sigma, so I'm stuck again. Does anyone have experience of both lenses? (with the amount of time Pentax have been making that FA I'm guessing there might be!)

My primary concern with the Sigma (apart from the size, and whether what is now a higher price is worth it) is the reported focusing issues - although I understand these are a) More common on Canon bodies, where Sigma has always had problems and b) apparently/allegedly fixed in subsequent post-release batches.

Opinions?

If you're stuck for desktop PC choice, you could try one of the gaming-oriented makers like Cyberpower or Mesh: they generally have (very specific) system configuration options so you could get whatever you need in terms of graphics card, RAM etc. for Photoshop and such things.

I've never used a Mac myself (and they do seem more expensive than equivalent Windows systems) but remember that graphics editing has always been seen as the primary strength of Macs!

I'm aware that some older MF lenses (e.g. the Takumar 55mm) are very mildly radioactive. The relative importance of this has been discussed to death in plenty of places, but does anyone know whether the Helios 44M series has this 'attribute'?

AFAIK the new one is optically identical to the non-WR (which I have also recently purchased, in its Samsung disguise) with the exception of the aperture: the new WR has more aperture blades giving (in theory) rounder, smoother bokeh.

I have a Redsnapper TRI-283 (with the standard lever-operated head, whatever that's called in tripod jargon ) - can't remember exactly how much I paid for it but it was well short of £100. It is noticeable weight-wise but then if (like me) you don't have hundreds to blow on a carbon fibre model then all brands will be similar. Also, the Redsnapper comes with its own carrying case (not all makes do IIRC) which includes a comfy strap pad. I've not used it on weird inclines or in high wind, but it seems solid.

Only if you use DNG as far as I'm aware - my PEF images tend to be a bit smaller than that (~18-19Mb) so if you're often running out of space that might be an option.

Wouldn't have thought all that could fit in there from the first picture!