Whilst some of the above comments are encouraging, and they do get some good reviews, I was put off Microglobe after reading a number of poor reviews which inferred that 'new' items were in fact repackaged returns as well as difficult and discourteous customer service over returns. On that basis I decided against risking the purchase of a lens in favour of Carmarthen Cameras at the next best available price and which at the time included a 'free' UV filter.

Sounds horrendous! I had a similar thing when I loaded all my photos onto a new portable hard drive, checked they were ok and binned the originals to save space. Next day a message said they were all corrupted! I had put the hard drive in a drawer with some batteries and a disc reader so that must have scrambled it. Luckily able to recover originals and now I am very careful to store it well away from anything electronic.

I use a Samsung 16 Evo supplied by Clifton Cameras when I bought my camera and so far hasn't let me down. I normally plug the card into the computer, open a new file and drag the photos across to copy them all for editing.

I hope they manage to recover your photos.

I am going to plug for the K50 which I have been really pleased with - it seems to be the least talked about but is a proper weather-resistant DSLR at a great price, handles well and I am still learning (and surprised by) some of the features. As you are keen on macro then take the cost of a good macro lens into account when considering your budget. Good luck!

Well at least you get a manual with Pentax! Not always the case with other makes

Just a complete blank

As a response to being nagged about 'getting something done' about all the old family snaps on 35mm slides in the loft I decided to have a go at digitizing them myself. First up I checked for a suitable light table and instead of those available on photographic suppliers' websites I ordered a Minisun A4 LED LightPad from Amazon for £29.95 - this has the advantage of coming with a mains transformer and as the name implies it is A4 so can be used for other projects, and has LEDs so it is really slim and I have found it very good. I masked it over with black paper except for a 35mm size cut-out for the light to come through, and fixed two card strips so that the slides are always in the same place. I set up the camera with a 100mm macro lens on a tripod, and use Live View with a cable switch and antishake switched off. The camera is set to minimum ISO 100-200, and aperture priority at F10, and I have found that the best colour is given by setting the white balance at 10,000K. It is necessary to avoid stray light on the slide from sunlight or a room light.

The theory was that once set up I could rapidly click through by placing the slides one at a time against the card strips; however I have found that the focus needs checking regularly and stray hairs and dust appear on the LightPad from the old slides so that needs checking as well; also to get accurate exposure I need to adjust the EV quite often especially if the originals were over- or under-exposed. However the results are pretty good although not as sharp as I would expect but it is difficult to see how the originals would look without a large viewer or projector. Does anyone else have any experience of this? I would add that most of the slides are 40-50 years old.

Just ordered a small secondhand item off e-Bay from a US supplier, cost $34.95 (about £22.55). Delivery: $24.00. Import duty and VAT: £12.11 I have to go and collect it (so much for first class delivery!) and Royal Mail won't hand it over until duty & VAT paid. This comes in total to £72.63! Hell's teeth that's something I won't do again!

I have just read a beef in AP about cameras only coming with digitized instruction manuals now, and the difficulties that presents when out and about - imagine trying to scroll through a hundred-odd pages on an iphone in daylight! The justification is the cost of printing manuals apparently. Well hurrah to Ricoh/Pentax for understanding their customers' needs better than the other manufacturers and including the handy sized English language-only manuals which came with my K50 and flashgun; presumably the same applies to other models. I hope Ricoh get this message and long may it continue.

[quote:3496ace15f="cabstar"]That's not exactly true. If you where to take a photograph of the gerkhin as an example and the start selling mugs with that image on you would have infringed the architects copyright in that building.

Copyright of the image would be vested in the photographer not the architect. If this comes about then we will be hounded by companies scouring the internet to hunt down infringements and offering legal representation like the ambulance-chasers after every minor collision, so of course the question is where is the pressure for this coming from? Any bets on copyright lawyers looking greedily at how successful PPI claim reps have been?

I don't do Facebook or Twitter; am on LInkedIn but fed up with constantly being asked to join with people who see me as a sales lead. My son is an avid FB user and if one of the crowd doesn't get many 'likes' from an entry they get all arsy! And that's the insidious part, not getting many 'likes' implies a negative response rather than just no comment.