I have been besieged with ads for slippers. Says it all!

Depends what you use it for, pan and tilt is limited in that the tripod must be dead level as there is no lateral adjustment. A 3-way head might be worth considering as you can move in one plane at a time, better for panoramas for instance.

Sorry Nigel, I think I am missing the point - if you are going to edit then why not just use RAW? I save to a TIFF as well when exporting to DXO Viewpoint (triples the file size by the way) before saving as a PDF.

And now we are back to normal, drizzle, grey skies, indoors and browsing!

Sorry Philip you are right, a common misconception I have fallen under. It does degrade however every time you open a JPEG to edit and save even if selecting 100% so JPEGs straight from the camera would suffer from this.

Off topic slightly John so apologies, but Nigel I find for 90% of my images I use the same tweaks in Lightroom so if I was organised like I am sure you are then I could save those settings as a preset and just apply with one hit to a batch of images, no time at all. Problem I have come across with JPEGs is every time you copy or duplicate an image it diminishes the quality. I only use JPEGs for record keeping at work and as a final output to 'fix' a processed image.

Me too, also found I am this kiss of death on any thread but hope not in this case! Lovely compositions Carol but I wonder how they would be in colour?

In TAV mode for instance the ISO is the only variable the camera applies to get a well balanced exposure, the high values weren't my choice but what came when I pressed the button - hence the grossly overexposed images.

The oil isn't on the blades but the aperture control ring. I am struggling on my iPad to paste a link but the issue is in PentaxForums.com thread: Pentax DFA 100mm Macro WR sticky blades? A contributor dismantled the lens, saw the problem, cleaned off the oil and then it was ok.

Thanks John, yes I tried different metering and use centre-weighted metering as a default, except when spot metering is needed to avoid overcompensating for a dark background. The aperture lever doesn't click back sharply, it is as if it is damped so I suspect that is the issue. I have been further experimenting in P mode, changing between AV hyper, TV hyper, and the ISO setting, and weirdly everything comes out properly exposed and more consistently so than other settings. If oil leaking onto the aperture control is not uncommon then shouldn't Ricoh do something about it?

PS when I said overexposing I was getting ISOs of 10,000 and higher when they should have been in the hundreds, not something I could manage with exposure compensation.

Further experimentation has shown that I get the most consistent results with AV Hyper mode, I just taken the same subject with a series of exposures in that mode, changing ISO and aperture, and they all look virtually identical. It also allows you to change focus mode which Auto won't. No idea why this mode works when the TAV, AV and manual give mixed results but I shall keep experimenting and maybe hold off getting a repair as it sounds like the problem doesn't get fixed once and for all.