NEW CAMERA - OLD LENSES

Freddy, at the time you weren't wrong! But things change over the years and things happen to the companies. Vivitar made good cameras and good lenses to compare with it's rivals and their lenses are still held in great respect. But because the company failed financially that stopped the production of cameras and lenses........but just because the original company doesn't make them anymore doesn't make them any less in quality.
Tamron and Sigma have kept an eye on the global market and what the changing demands of the photographer are. We in the UK sometimes have a some "closed view" of what's been happening to the Camera and Lenses market and forget that they are dealing with a huge global market outside the UK. So they've succeeded in marketing and also providing the kind of high quality, specific use, lenses wanted and are still doing so. Vivitar on the hand fell by the wayside not due to the quality of their cameras and lenses but due to their management failure..
Vivatar lenses are in the "legacy" class now and so can be bought quite cheaply but have to contend with other "legacy glass" that either bears the owned camera brand, making them immediately compatible, or third party lens manufacturers who made lenses of quality in great numbers.
The cameras are now being manufactured under the brand of Vivitar by a company called Sakar who bought the Brand name and intellectual property but not Vivitar's manufacturing equipment. So the Vivitar camera of today has not the Vivitar essence of the original. But other camera companies have been taken over and rejuvenated recently so it's not a bad thing if they can make use of the history of quality and spirit of the company. Also the number of Camera, Lens, and Sensor manufacturers that are intertwined with each other, holding stock shares of each others, has made for standardisation. But I digress.
I don't think the Vivitar "legacy" lenses deserve to be any less popular than the others, as they are of high quality, but due to the vagaries of the Photography world they are.

 

Hi Scrungee, good to hear from you Well, there seem to be lots of offers out there now for the K5II. Fordes are offering it at £664.00p plus claim back £70. But to be honest, I think the deals will come thick and fast now that the K3 has been introduced.......it's all smoke and mirrors with the Dealers anyway

 

The offer is in their advert in this weeks Amateur Photographers Magazine, Scrungee

The trouble is a lot of the enthusiast guys can't wait and will pre-order and pay top dollar just for the "privilege" of having "the latest and greatest". The K3 [body only] is being priced at £1099.00p and the number of people on the Pentax Forum have been falling over themselves to pre-order. It'll drop by a least a couple of hundred pounds by the end of next year so it seems daft to me to spend more than you need.

So true, Scrungee, and yet people will pay the prices!!

 

Hi Freddy, I can see where you're going with this as it is confusing. But the apertures referred to are the widest maximum apertures for the zoom lenses, i.e: F3.5 maximum open aperture when it's at 28mm [minimum focal length] and f.4.5 maximum open aperture when it's at 80mm [maximum focal length]. So those "f" numbers only refer to maximum open apertures at either ends of the focal length.
You will still have the ability to choose say from f3.5 to f22 when the lens is set at the minimum zoom focal length of 28mm and from f4.5 to f22 when the lens is set at the maximum focal length of 80mm. Does that make sense??