Almost as ugly as the gold LX with snakeskin leathers...

As regards the chromogenic BW films...

These films have a wide exposure latitude so it is very difficult to "get it wrong" (whatever wrong is...). If you over expose you get lower contrast but finer grain, whereas if you underexpose you get higher contrast but coarser grain. With Kodak BW400CN I set the light meter to ISO 320 which seems to give me good prints. It isn't really true that they give "low contrast", I'm often pulling back the contrast on the scans I get done.

Scans from happy snaps etc (and the prints) can have a nasty colour hue as they print the images on colour paper and do not filter out the orange base layer of the negative. Good quality labs such as "The Darkroom UK" will give prints and scans without the nasty colour cast but are quite expensive. I haven't tried Pentaxophile's link but they seem cheaper.

Part of the fun of analogue photography is trying different films (and if you have a darkroom developers/papers etc.) and deciding what works for you. I, for example, really don't like HP5 much, I find it comes out rather flat looking. I do like the CHS ART films which are traditional BW films, slow (as low as ISO 25) but have a nice "glow" to them. Hard to describe really.

If you look at my flickr photostream you'll find lots of film images, usually tagged with the film used.

Best wishes, Kris.

Harrow Technnical charge £66.50 for a full CLA including seals. Doing the seals is easy if tedious. The gunk in the channels around the door takes forever to clean out completely.

K.

Nonsense. Probably 80% of my lenses are manual focus only and I use them all the time with no problems. The lenses vary from f/1.2 to f/4 maximum aperture. Given the grey days lately they are mostly used at, or close to, wide open. I'll admit to having a better success rate since I fitted a katzeye screen, and to finding focusing much easier with my LX etc., than my K20D. I'm sure those who can afford Zeiss lenses don't complain about manual focus either!

K.

As Hyram said, any of these...

Failing that, a K18 or K85 would be nice...

K.

Could a mod please move this to the correct forum? Many thanks, K.

It is perfectly safe to use on your dSLR. You'll have to use it on manual though (hi and lo) as P-TTL and the older TTL are incompatible.

K.

True! Who knows what the over-zealous darkroom gofer managed to melt. I wasn't being entirely serious I hope you realise.

K.

As this is posted in the "film" section perhaps the moral is ditch the digi and go analogue?

K.

I like the third one but try making the whites a bit more white. They look a tad too grey for my taste. The first one looks very strange, I thought it was one of those poladroid images at first.

It looks just a tad cold...

K.