Best of luck on doing the wedding. I've only done one so far (my mothers) and I've refused others since!

The one I did was back in the pre-digital days and it was quite a nervous time while the films were getting developed. At least with digital it'll be possible to check the shots as you're going along. The key I found for weddings was to be organised - I mostly did ok however I'd only brought one flash unit for my Bronica ETRS and it packed in on the day - I could have done with it for some of the outdoor shots as fill flash would have been useful. I had 35mm kit with me as well though (Z1p & MZ5) so I did have backup, but it's still not something I'd be desperately keen on doing again...

Here are a few shots from the day - apologies for the quality but the medium format ones were scanned from prints using not the best scanner in the world:

On Ebay you have to be wary of anyone without a solid history who's selling such high valued items. Even when they do have a history it's important to have a look and see if they've sold similar items before as the account may have been taken over by someone who'd "phished" the password.

Any pictures of the custom grip for the AF400FTZ? When I use mine for macro stuff I hand hold it which is a bit fiddly so I wouldn't mind a better solution.

Having sold most of my own MF bodies (only an ME-F left now) I think it's inevitable that at some point I'm going to regress and buy an LX. It's the only Pentax 35mm body which I've wanted and haven't yet owned. I could be swayed towards a 6x7 instead though...

It's a constant F4 throughout the zoom range so it'll look pretty bright compared to the 18-55. It'll look rather less bright if you're used to primes or F2.8 zooms.

After using my DS for a while I also ended up setting the camera to centre AF only as it seems a more natural and effective way of working most of the time. I have found a use for the multi-point AF though as it increases the hit rate markedly when using AF-C with birds in flight.

I see there is a 60-250 F4 on there as well - that could be useful. Nothing at the wide end though.

With zooms Pentax have started to put in place a good foundation for that e.g. for standard zooms we have the 18-55 as a starting point, the 16-45 F4which is about twice the price but significantly better then the 16-50 F2.8 which is a full stop faster and, hopefully, also better optically. The pricing isn't bad either with the 16-50mm F2.8 looking pretty good value in comparison to other manufacturers offerings.

For longer zooms we've got the 50-200 as the entry point then the 50-135 f2.8 at the top end, although we're missing the constant F4 lens.

At the wide end we've got the middle lens (12-24mm F4) but not the top end F2.8 or an entry level version.

I bought into Pentax because I prefered the handling to the Nikon and Canon options at the time as it outweighed the lens availability issues (as did the option for using high-quality manual focus lenses cheap). That's still mostly the case today, although over the years I've found getting lenses (and even bodies given the search I had getting a DS) quite frustrating at times, although Tokina's support for Pentax with their F2.8 zooms helped.

From a Pentax perspective it would appear that while esoteric does (e.g. 43mm F1.9, 77mm F1.8, 21mm F3.2, 40mm F2.8, 77mm F1.8, 70mm F2.4 but ) neither fast or low prices do!

Yes the build quality of the 50mm F1.8 isn't great, but that's why it's only £69! I've had a play with it on a friends camera and I've seen some reviews and those all confirm that optically it's a very decent performer.

That's not my experience with friends who own Canon systems. Several of them asked me about buying a portrait lens to supplement zooms and all of them bought the 50mm F1.8 as I'd recommended - and all are very happy with it. Of course they've seen the results I can get with my FA* 85mm F1.4 and accept that it's considerably better than their lenses can produce, but then it was also 10x the price... If they'd have gone for Pentax systems (none of them did unfortunately because at the time they were few and far between in the shops) then I'm certain they'd have been happy with the FA 50mm F1.4 as well, however they'd also have been far less likely to purchase one given the difference in cost.

I'm not particularily promoting Canon, however the Pentax lens range isn't ideal (for me at least) in that while there are several primes available they're mostly either too expensive (the limiteds), too slow given the cost (most of the DA lenses) or at focal lengths I'm not that interested in (43mm, 49mm). There are exceptions in the FA 50mm F1.4 which is a great lens for the price (although there is no longer a slightly slower but cheaper option) and the macro lenses - but not many. Yes if you're looking for the ultimate in lens quality then the Pentax limiteds are probably the best available (now that the best lens ever produced, the FA* 85mm F1.4 is no longer in production) but if you're just looking for some decent quality, reasonable priced primes then other manufacturers do have more available.

Like Canon, the Nikon range also has a number of reasonably priced primes available (although still nothing wide because of the issues with APS-C) e.g.:

28mm F2.8 £158
35mm F2 £199
50mm F1.8 £79
85mm F1.8 £249