Have you thought of creating a Lightroom preset that recreates the CCD look?

For me, the difference between the CCD and CMOS 'look' are pretty academic at lower ISOs... by which I mean you would only really notice at 1:1 crops... and even the K7 is better at high ISOs!

I am sure the number of people who would prefer CCD would not be remotely enough to justify a parallel line of CCD cameras...

I would go with your gut. Over on the other forum (Pentax Forums) I have heard excellent things about the Sigma, including from a guy predominantly using it to shoot his son. Have a look at their lens review database.
The tamron is also excellent though.

I've noticed with older manual lenses you need to hit the AEL button after you start recording.

Use an external mic or sound recorder if you want to record sound.

Use your fast lenses wide open, it looks nice!

Make use of shake reduction for hand held shooting. Works very well!

I used to shoot film too, but the instant review capability of digital has really improved my shots. On film, by the time I got my slides or prints back my errors were long forgotten

The quality of images from the K7 far exceeds anything I've shot on film... even at moderately high ISOs, huge prints are possible. As an experiment I printed off a small part of an ISO500 photo at what would be almost A1 if the whole shot were printed, and the quality is more than acceptable viewed at a couple of feet.

Hmmm... if the t&c's are going to put the serious 'togs off... I'm in!

The latest batch (14mp sensor, such as the RZ10) look pretty good.... noise is still a problem at medium ISOs when viewed at 1:1 (and forget about ISOs above 800) but the higher resolution would make this less of a problem at normal print / web sizes.

That Optio 555 looks pretty good, a shame its zoom only starts at 38mm though!

This is hard for me to understand. I have always thought of aperture as one of the main creative levers open to the photographer. An ultra fast lens therefore gives you more leverage, particularly important on a crop sensor where narrow dof is harder to achieve. On my film SLR I sometimes used to set my 50mm to f2 and put the point of focus where I wanted it. To achieve the same on a crop sensor DSLR I would need something like the 30mm f1.4.

And of course it lets you take pictures at a lower ISO than would otherwise have been possible.

That's an excellent point Smegster. I love looking at those shots when researching trips and holidays (or just randomly wasting time online ) but have never bothered uploading one.

Good sweep in the first shot, but the shot of the fountains - WOW! Excellent stuff.

I agree with Paul's analysis, but I think you can crop to reduce the impact of that slope without entirely cropping it out. You also lose that gorgeous sunlit 'tor' on the left hand side. Here's my alternative version which is a bit less of a drastic crop:




http://i786.photobucket.com/albums/yy148/willdb_photo/landscapeiii.jpg?t=1306698...

It's a belting landscape shot Dave, well worth working hard on to get the most from it!