"Manufacturers compete, retailers monopolise to make a profit", perhaps?

It sounds as thought what the mega-retailers are doing is carrying the odd special deal/package from the smaller manufacturers, inc Pentax, but not a range. The more I think about what I currently see in London shops is that full ranges are rarely displayed. Sony seem to have managed this, but I imagine they have very deep pockets indeed! Curious isn't it, the appearance of Sony and Panasonic / Lumix who are not really camera manufacturers but very large electronics goods makers. Can't help feeling that with the recession they may be gone as quickly as they came as they can't be making much money. You have to hope that Hoya offers the financial backing to see Pentax through.

Do you have Pentax DSLRs in Currys/Dixons/PC World locally?

Several times recently I have wondered about Pentax's future. I agree with the comments about Jessops (a family member used to be an accountant there and told me about how they screwed-up the stockmarket flotation that was intended to make senior managers rich!). However, not only do Jessops not stock Pentax now, but neither do the awful Currys/Dixons/PC World chain which accounts for most of what Joe Public ever sees!
A couple of years ago I complained about Pentax's awful UK website (admittedly now much improved) so that must have counted against them as well.
But if I had to bet on what really matters, it will be special deals and freebies on offer to the buyers of large retailers.
I shall carry on enjoying my K10D for the foreseeable future but I suspect there won't be more than two or three SLR manufacturers around in two years' time.

Of course, I broke my own rules and bought an 55-200mm Sigma yesterday because I wasn't getting far with photographing blue tits with an 18-55 and although the legs still work, the wings atrophied at an earlier stage of evolution.

Any views on the Sigma 55 -200? (I was trying to justify a Pentax 50-135 for my birthday present to self but it was almost 6x the cost and rather bulky by comparison. Nice bit of schmutter, though.)

I read years ago that the best zoom lens was your legs - just get closer! I'm crap at it and years ago admitted that the reason I take mediocre pictures is because I don't take enough time and effort. A friend who started in the hobby years after me proved this (unwittingly) with his wonderful pictures of India taken at 3am in the morning or after lengthy journeys.
He is now a professional railway photographer and I just take snaps of the garden birds.

I'm not the greatest at the physics of this, but I thought that a 135mm on a DSLR was roughly equivalent to a 200mm on a film DSLR (you'll know why). Now, my recollection is that we were always taught that it was not really on to exceed 1/x when handholding lenses, i.e. a 50mm lens would be fine at 1/60th but not at 1/30th. So I would have expected, were I comrade SUBSTITUTE, to use a shutter-speed of at least 1/125th at maximum focal length and 1/250th to get pin-sharp.
Of course, you might expect more of the K10D with anti-shake on, but he doesn't say that was the set-up.
I am particularly baffled at the comparison with shorter smc lenses - the point is precisely the focal length in use. It isn't magic, but maths.
Of course, SUBSTITUTE may be right and this lens is worthless. If so, and it is in mint condition, I'll take it off his hands for a fiver and just keep it polished on my mantlepiece as a monument to folly. I'm thoughtful like that.
PS I actually quite liked the pictures and soft focus didn't seem too inappropriate.

While I'm owning up to idiocy, a little warning about the K10D - which is great, by the way. For reasons I don't understand, you can set the part of the screen which it focuses on to various areas. When I first got it, I din't know about this and - somehow - must have set it for an off-centre spot. Of course, I carried on doing as I have always done, centre what you want to focus on, hold the shutter-release at half-way and recompose. Needless to say, it seemed for some time that the camera was incapable of focusing and I was feeling prettty annoyed.
As ever, it was a case of "Read The Frightfully-helpful Manual" and when I cam across the feature, I checked the settings and - behold! Sharp focusing. It all ended happily - I still take crap pictures, but that's my fault - but can anyone tell me what is the point of this feature?

I recently became dissatisfied with a Tamron 28- 105 lens that I was given as a birthday present a few years ago. I had taken a couple of pictures with massive flare (under admittedly provoking conditions). When I read about such issues with this lens (on another website) I was almost growling at myself.

The other day, I sat down to tidy up my camera bag and looked at the front of the lens. It had a 1A filter on it, from when it used to be commonplace advice to fit one "to protect the expensive front element".

So I removed the filter and took some "provocative" pictures e.g. of a tree-line facing directly into bright sun. No problem.

Moral: there is a point to all that super-coating and similar, so don't ruin it by false economy!
Has anyone else found themselves doing something daft out of habit?

I'm in UK and all my settings are correct. Bizarrely enough, my "blind-clicking succeeded in installing both programmes, though they didn't show up in the Windows start menu.
Thanks for answering, forum folks.