Not only will it work well with the DL, it's just about the only available flash that will...

My CRV's lasted about a month and I seemed to get roughly twice as many shots out of them as I do from a full charged set of NiMH's.

Brian - excellent news on the cleanup of your lenses. I'll pay them a visit myself as I've a couple of things I'd like to get done.

McBrian,

Thanks, and best of luck getting those lenses sorted out.

Regards
Steve

Best of luck getting those lenses fixed.

A question about Cameratiks - I need to get my FA* 85mm serviced so would you recommend them as a local option?

P.S. I relented and bid on your Tokina as I couldn't resist it.

I can't see anything there that says that it's P-TTL as it would need to be to be equivalent to the 360 (and to work properly on a DL).

For the DS where the flash doesn't need to be P-TTL then you might want to look for a AF400FTZ on Ebay as I've seen those for similar prices - that's an excellent flash and works very well on the DS.

I was testing 50mm lenses earlier but I decided that as I temporarily do have another consumer zoom (bought as part of a bundle) I'd try it against the 18-55.

The other lens was a SMC-FA 28-80mm F3.5-5.6 - one of the silver ones you used to see with the MZ50 etc. I compared them at 28mm and 50mm. At 28mm the 28-80 was slightly better until F16 where the 18-55 edged it. At 50mm they were very close at all apertures - too close to call really.

While I was at it I also compared both lenses at 50mm with the FA50 - at F4 or so (wide open on the two zooms) the FA50 was miles better and it remained noticeably sharper at all smaller apertures.

My conclusion is that it's probably just these very low price entry-level zooms that I don't like, and the 18-55 is not all that much worse than Pentax's cheapest zooms have been for a few years. The current FA28-80 seems about as bad as I remember my old powerzoom FA 28-80 being, although at least it was a bit better built (and I remember complaining about it's build quality at the time!).

Perhaps mine is a bad example, however it's so soft in the corners that it no longer gets used - the only reason I haven't sold it is because it's not worth anything. Mine was comprehensively outperformed by a cheap Pheonix 19-35mm AF zoom, so it's not just more expensive lenses that out-perform it.

My style of shooting requires decent corner sharpness, and that's perhaps why my experience with the 18-55 is so bad. The only lens I've ever used that was softer in the corners was the Vivitar 19mm F3.8.

Thanks for that - I recently added a non-macro AF 50mm (SMC-FA 50mm F1.7) so it sounds like there is no need to replace the old Vivitar Macro.

How useful are you finding AF for Macro? I've only used an old manual focus macro lens so far but was considering getting something more modern.