It is normal because of the dual barrel extension. Is a little odd to get used to as it is not fluid like the 50-135 or other lenses.

Moretonhampstead is a better location as it is fairly central, close to the a30 and a38. main transit links.

I's have to agree that it is a great lens. It is sharp and very usable wide open as it has no distortion, no CA, no PF. It is a perfect lens.

There is a Samsung specialist dealer in York so it is full of K-Mount stuff just with blue rings and Samsung/Shneider stamped on it.

Because you need to build in a second cirquit set for additional memory, this complicates the board which already has limited space and adds to cost. It is hardly ever needed as most people keep several cards with the camera bag. Personally I have one in the camera, one in the grip and one in my bag.

Most compacts have stupid built in memory like 16MB or 24MB maybe 64MB which will give you nothing at all.

Flash needs no power to maintain the data, brilliant technology. I would love to back up all my photos on an SSD but that would cost a lot.

Yeah, upgrading is pointless for the majority of people. I did get my mum a netbook though as it is cheap, cheerful, portable and uses less power than a lightbulb (standard 60W incandescent) compared to 200W+ of a PC (or even my notebook).

Well, Flash memory has a longer lifespan than optical media such as CD, DVD or Bluray (generally 5 years). It has a longer lifespan than hard disks (generally arround 10 years as the vapuour lubricant will slowly escape) as well. For data longevity and security nothing beats it (as long as you pick up a good quality card or SSD).

Flash has no moving parts and are very shock resistant, when data is written it phisically changes the structure of the cell that is written. If it is no longer readable they are the easiest to recover data from (if given to a forensic recovery company).

I have a pre-set in Lightroom that completely removes all CA from my 16-50 shots and also removes PF. Each lens will vary but most should be quite similar if they are good copies. I've had two copies and they had quite different CA and PF. The first had misaligned elements and the SDM broke.

In my copy the PF is actually caused by a mixing of CA of cyan and red so it vanishes with ease. and at most focal lengths the adjustment for CA is basically the same.

Well as i was buying new from Dell XP was not an option I could get out of them. Secondly a lot of the drivers don't exist or work for that machine. I chose the 9500M GE which is the motherboard GPU and a dedicated GPU working in tandem (SLI). Really weird setup but the driver only seems to work correctly in Vista (damned nVidia).

It is fine as long as you don't have to interact with the OS. Once a program is open it generally runs smoothly but as soon as you touch Vista again it buggers everything up for a bit.

Windows 7 looks much better, smaller footprint, more streamlined and some customisability by having a few modular bits.