That's the nub of it, and you had your answer in the first few replies, before the thread digressed! If you don't want to get into the technicalities, like pushing ISO, just do what HG suggests

Yes the new camera will come with full warranty and paperwork, and will be easy to either sell unopened or get sorted should further issues arise.

Presumably more convenient than using stickers if you load your own film cassettes or had stocks of non DX film. Perhaps users and manufacturers were just getting used to DX when the camera was introduced?

There's a manual ASA dial on the camera John, so you just need to mask the DX coding and set it manually - no need to use stickers!

To use the ASA dial as 'exposure compensation' you would need to mask the DX coding and set the ASA manually too.

I think you're best sticking to one ASA rating for a roll of film, otherwise how will you develop them correctly? (Although Matt suggests some films a tolerant of gross underesposure without push processing, presumably you just increase the enlarger time?)

If you find it confusing - and aren't processing the films yourself - just don't bother with it at all!

However - you can change the ASA dial as a sort of proxy 'exposure compensation' - go from 200 to 800 if you want to deliberately underexpose by a couple of shots for example. Just remember to change back!

Well... Pentax compacts perform well enough for their price point, but to me the image quality ranges from poor to average. This is not unique to Pentax though, most of the competition is pretty ropey too. It is a shame if people think this has any bearing on DSLR image quality, it certainly doesn't.

I'm glad about the merger with Ricoh as they major on image quality, innovation, and manual control with their compacts - exactly what is currently lacking from Pentax's range.

You can use a 200 ASA film as 400 ASA and push process it. Think of it like underexposing all your digital shots by 1 Ev then increasing the Ev by +1 in Lightroom.

I gave up using M42 lenses because of the dark viewfinder on stopping down. You'll get the same if you do this- the lever is there for a reason. I also think it might affect a split focusing screen's usability.

The green button metering is perfectly good enough IMO, and easy to do.

Well it arrived with the buyer yesterday (not bad considering I posted it on Friday, to Slovenia) and buyer confirms it works with HSM!

It's great to have a WR camera you can leave in the open during rain. But I never let a non-WR camera stop me taking rainy day pics in the past. You just got to be careful.