My family and I just spent a wonderful week on the Jersey shore. I had my K10 with the Pentax 50-135 on it all week, I did bring the rest of my lenses but they all stayed in the bag. While walking up from the water a guy asked me what I was using, so of course I proudly proclaimed I was using a Pentax K10 with the 50-135 and pointed out that the weather sealing on both the body and the lens allowed me to use it without any worries on the beach. The gentleman looked at me and nodded at his bag saying he had a N brand D80 in it that he was afraid to take out on the beach. We spoke for a while about the differences in the image stabilization between Pentax and the N brand, he was complaining about the added cost for the image stabilized N brand lenses, and cringed when I told him even my manual lenses worked just fine on the K10. I offered to let him try it out and he took a number of shots with it and looked at me and said, well I guess I know what camera I'm going to have next year.
This was the first time that I've had someone convince themselves to switch brands by just letting them hold the camera. I guess the combination of the being on the beach and not being able to use his N brand D80 while I was out shooting my heart out was more than enough to change his mind.
