A few years ago I discovered rangefinders too and treated myself to a full Contax G system. It was a lovely camera and beautifully made however it soon became apparant that my Z1p and FA* lenses took better pictures more often so the Contax system was eventually sold.

Very, very tempted. Do you think SWMBO would miss it amongst all the other Christmas action on the credit card?

I bought a DS and 18-55mm lens kit from Jessops today for about £550 and IMHO that's a better option that the DL.

Most of my existing equipment should work well with it, however I'm going to have to do something at the wide angle end as I've now for two zooms with 18mm wide ends but that's only about 27mm equivalent with the DS.

I've found that a lens like a 80-200 F2.8 is extremely versatile and I'd much rather have one of those than the likes of a slower 50-500 zoom. Adding a 2x converter to the faster zoom will also be useful.

I've got the Tokina ATX-Pro 80-200 and I've found it to be excellent if heavy.

The 18-55 is ok for point and shoot style stuff and it's quite decent at portrait lengths when stopped down (I had a play in the studio with mine).

It's probably ok(ish) when stopped to F11 or so at the wide end as well.

When I got mine just before Christmas Jessops were doing the DS and kit lens for about £550 so if you could sell the kit lens you'd possibly be close to the price of the DL.

Having gone digital I'm not regretting selling my own 24mm so I reckon you'd get good use out of yours. I've been using an old SMC-M 50mm F1.7 quite a bit. The two zooms should work fine although so far with my DS the only zoom I've had satisfactory performance from was an 80-200 F2.8.

I wrote a review of this lens for photo.net a few years back. You can see it at http://photo.net/equipment/pentax/smc28-200

I wandered out for an hour or so last week shooting some film for a change. I just had a Z1p, Tokina ATX-Pro 20-35mm F2.8, a 50mm F1.2 and a Cokin red filter (I was shooting B&W). It made a nice change from shooting digital but I am missing the instant review of results.

I wandered about Edinburgh yesterday and just used the DS and 10-20mm despite having several other lenses with me. The weather wasn't the best (thunderstorms and torrential rain for some of it) but I did get a couple of fun shots e.g:




The 10-20 is great for a single walkabout lens - you can even get fun candids with it by holding it down at your side and snapping away as folks don't notice.

I used to quite often use a setup of an MZ5 plus the FA* 24mm and FA* 85mm lenses. That was reasonably small and light but still capable of fantastic quality results.

Now I expect if I had to go with a single body and lens it'd be the DS and Sigma 10-20mm. Adding a second lens it'd have to be the 80-200 F2.8.

My most common system these days packs into a Lowepro Slingshot 200AW and consists of the following:

DS, Sigma 10-20, FA 50mm F1.7, Sigma 24-135 F2.8-4m Tokina 80-200 F2.8, Kenko MC7 2x, 77mm circular polariser, Cokin ND grads and IR filters. Sometimes I stick a macro lens in their as well, but I find that covers the vast majority of my photography.

Personally I'd be quite happy never having to set the aperture except on the lens if it wasn't for the fact that Pentax have produced lenses without an aperture ring and ditched full support for the aperture ring in the DSLR's!

I was shooting some frosty scene pics at lunchtime today with a SMC-M 50mm F1.7 fitted to my DS and I think it'll be a while before the way metering has to be done with that combination becomes second nature to me.