Amin,

I am somewhat disappointed but alas not surprised that moderators have seen fit to allow your post to stand, comprising solely of a somewhat tedious and - dare I say - whinging rant directed at yours truly.

However, I am much more disappointed for your sake that you haven't been able to put that event behind you; if you want to reopen the original topic please feel free to do so but I am unwilling to participate in that discussion indirectly.

He'll certainly need a comprehensive money back guarantee if he buys that thing, which as coincidence would have it I had occasion to inspect first hand when I stopped off at Mr Cad's on the way back from a family birthday in Purley last Saturday.

Indeed Mr Cad had two copies, the less expensive of which had somewhat less damage to the optics but was not in the half price sale. This set off dodgy pricing alarm bells that with hindsight may have been exaggerated given the amount of stock they had, but both samples nevertheless had chips in the front element I fear Autoglass would have qualms about attempting a repair on.

In any case the bloke I dealt with offered me the 'better' copy for £45 which I graciously declined. However, he did assert that nice copies go for £300, which if you could get such a thing in a half price sale is not far off the asking price in the OP's eBay sale

Are you referring to the report on Photo Rumors about a quote from the Hoya CEO in a recent interview with the Nikkei?
The latter eventuality would be extremely bad news indeed, whereas the impact of the former would be entirely contingent on the identity of a possible buyer.

Unfortunately, I think there are indications that Hoya have already had Pentax in the shop window for some time, and the longer that carries on without a buyer emerging the higher the probability of an unequivocally negative outcome.

Right.

Numerous more or less knowable factors could be at work, which is why all you can do is eliminate relative convenience as a possible reason.

The objective of this exercise is worthy but neither the original approach nor the one you outline are in any sense rigorous since both fail to take time into account.

If you consider any mechanical product, the greater the age the greater the chances of a fault developing. However, here a faultless lens (in terms of SDM) is equally weighted whether it is a 2 weeks old or two years. As such Richard's apparent inference that problems with SDM have been fixed in the 60-250mm is simply unsustainable; it could just as easily be due to the fact that the model has only recently been released.

If time owned and time to fault were provided you could plot the data in a scatter diagram, and try to determine whether clusters are forming in terms of time to failure, either on a lens by lens basis or in aggregate for all models.

Separately, I must say that the requirement that faults must be detailed while problem free instances just get to cast a vote are a complete no-no from a survey design perspective. You simply can not make the casting of one type of vote easier than another, especially when the more onerous is the case you are explicitly attempting to disprove. I think this is illustrated in Richard's comment that average ownership is 2.5 lenses/respondent which I don't believe passes the smell test.

However, if the survey were repeated on the basis that qualitative data is required from all respondents (eg "I have had lenses xyz for abc months respectively and no faults have developed") that issue would be eliminated.

What you mean there, George is "By the same grammatical construction".

In order for your original statement to be valid, killing tens of millions of fellow countrymen would have to be morally on par with reading the gossip columns or enjoying a good a glossy magazine; clearly such a view would represent hysterical nonsense.

To set up a valid analogy that avoids such a strawman logical fallacy, here's a little tip; you need to contemplate the question "who is the moron?" in much greater depth.

And on the general subject of anti-pap, I came across details of this state of the art system that every privacy loving B-List celebrity ought to employ as a matter of course:

With apologies to the shallow for departing momentarily from the apparently vital area of aesthetics, Photorumors is carrying a snippet of an interview with a Sony executive that sheds further light on Kx IQ:

Source: (see comments below main blurb)

I don't think that would work at all unless Pentax were to develop a Canon style Mark II nomenclature and I can't see that happening somehow; otherwise it would simply be too confusing.

However, in order to retain some semblance of internal logic the product line up is now screaming either for a K8 or K30 or something that would put clear multi-coloured water in an aspirational direction between it and the KX.

As for this business abut weather sealing, thank God Pentax appear to have ditched that marketing message like the dog it is; the vast majority of prospective buyers want to identify with bright 'n breezy, warm and colourful and certainly not some mud-infested, damp squib.

Even so I very much doubt that the new multi-coloured line-up is the slam-dunk most appear to believe but at least it isn't a direct turn off.

I am puzzled by the marketing strategy period.

In particular, if the KX uses the Sony Exmoor sensor as appears to be the case, from what I can gather it could well produce better IQ than the K7 certainly at high ISOs.

Don't get me wrong, as a potential repeat customer I am certainly not complaining about that, but it serves to illustrate that half-assed nature of Pentax's aherm marketing strategy.

However, the apparent breakdown in Pentax's relationship with Samsung has likely played some kind of role in this, and if the end result is better price/performance then the consequences are obviously nowhere near as negative as I initially believed.