I'd tend to agree.

When I lived in Hong Kong I'd often see tourists buying top spec camera bodies such as the Z1p, Nikon F90x or Canon EOS-1 and then getting a cheap 28-200 zoom as their only lens. IMHO these camera bodies should be bought to complement great lenses not to have consumer zooms stuck on them.

I started off with a Z50p and a couple of powerzooms - 28-80 and 100-300 - which weren't very good. Eventually I replaced those with F2.8 zooms (Tokina ATX-Pro's) and then the Z1p. While I still love my Z1p the lenses are more important and they, plus my fast primes, while be in use long after it's been retired.

No interest in the above.

But all these I would find useful as it'd become closer to the handling of my beloved Z1p.

I'd have been happy to pay more for a D had I been able to find one, however I had enough trouble with the DS and it'll do until Pentax come out with a proper digital replacement for the Z1p.

I was in Jessops at the weekend and they had the DL + 18-55 kit for about £530 and the DS + 18-55 kit for about £550. I was after the DS kit which my local shop (Edinburgh) didn't have but Glasgow and Dundee did, so I drove to Glasgow.

Other Jessops shops might also still have stock of the DS.

Thanks for that. I see Empire are only listing the DS kit as well, and given I don't want the zoom lens that's not ideal either.

I might try contacting Park Cameras or Cameraworld and see if they can get the bare DS.

It'd be worth trying the same shot but stopped down to F8 or F11. My own experience with similar lenses is that they tend to be quite soft wide open, but improve a lot when used a stop or two down. With digital you've got more flexibility to use the smaller apertures handheld as you can always up the ISO if necessary. The SMC-FA 28-200 I've got is very soft wide open at the long end, but significantly better a stop or two down.

Well I got an R72 filter and initial experimentation looks promising however I've a question about post-processing of the images. At the moment I'm just converting to B&W in photoshop elements but I'd be interesting in what other folks are doing to process the image from the camera.

Very interesting thread. A couple of questions:

1) What sort of exposures were required with the R72 filter?
2) Anyone tried a milder filter? I've got a wratten 29 gel which I used to use with IR film so I was thinking about giving that a try.