I am waiting with bated breath for some info about my dead 50-135mm...

I, too, leave the country in three weeks for the whole summer! This story gives me hope.

Kris.

K-9 did feature in one of the new Dr Who episodes which I saw when I was stateside.

There used to be an advert for a vacuum cleaner where the tag line was "Electrolux sucks". That didn't quite work in the US

Magic pixie dust I wasn't being that serious... hefty knows why! LOL. I wouldn't discount the 60-250 so quickly, 115mm is quite a bit. The 12-24mm is lovely, but if you have low light issues perhaps one of the wide primes like the DA 14? The idea of selling one K20 would seem sensible and then you could have a new body and some glass, if not 1200 quids worth.

Purple fringing, see this thread. Not a problem when photographing purple foxgloves!

One or other of the longer non-Pentax macros is on my wish list unless I happen to win the lottery. Unlikely as I don't do the lottery...

I've been playing in CS3... not convinced about this one yet!

I use a polariser as often as the light will let me get away with it.

I now only shoot RAW now. When using Lightroom you don't even notice that there is a conversion stage! Almost everything is done in Lightroom (levels, colour, curves, dust spotting, cropping and straightening) and then I export the lot when I have finished tweaking them. Even the work in CS3 is from a file exported from Lightroom and then automatically updated within it and then exported as a jpeg of the right size. As Pete says, for unproblematic photos I doubt there is much to be gained but with difficult shots (either ones I have messed up taking or ones with a wide dynamic range) RAW seems to work better than jpeg.

I suspect that John does an extremely good job in camera which means he doesn't need the safety net of RAW. One of the reasons I still shoot a bit of film is to stop myself becoming even lazier!

Best wishes, Kris.

You'll want a FA 43mm Ltd then....

I was sent a free roll of film with my ES purchase and didn't take much notice of what it was. I ran it through the camera assuming it was a cheapo print film and turned out to be slides. The ES did a stunning job of the metering, even in the snow. I rather like the ES! Just need a few more SMC Taks...

Mmmm bit off thread from the K-7.

BTW, does anyone know why K-7? What happened to 1 to 6? Will we ever have a K-9?

12-24mm and the DA* 300mm .... :

IMHO glass lasts, bodies come and go. With 2 x K20Ds I cannot see much point going to the K-7 unless there is something very specific you want from it. Give it a year or two and the bodies will come down in price (although you'll probably want the K-9 then) but the glass is unlikely to drop by much.

Just my tuppence worth.