You may have notice that there is quite a strong presence of Pentax Cameras around here.

While I am not expecting to put up a mono-brand stop place, I wish to maintain Pentax (film cameras) centrality. We’re speaking 35mm mostly here, albeit not exclusively.

The reason is largely personal.

The first film camera I ever used, if we exclude the immortal ninja turtles film camera and an unnamed point and shoot, was my dad’s ME Super, with a 50mm 2.8 A-lens and a 50mm 1.7 M.

That was a lot of camera. There was a feeling on awe when he was explaining me what a wide angle was and how did it differ. It also looked, and felt – precious, and this was reflected in the way he treated it. These items ARE precious.

The ME super (I still have that one – I’ll make a post on it) is a fantastic camera. It offers full manual control, it is THE smallest SLR (it is smaller than the MX), it is robust (yet nowadays exposed to a couple of problematic quirks), it has a splendid viewfinder (a “window on the world”) it can do everything.

On the negative side, it has an electronic shutter (which I am finding increasingly fond of – another post-to-come), the time is controlled by two dials – which I liked at first but now I prefer the wheel, it has no DOF preview,  in the viewfinder it shows the speed selected and whether you are over\under exposing according to the meter, but not how much.

Thinking about it, the different ways to show info in the viewfinder are worth a full post themselves.

So this camera “imprinted” me. Then I found the Super A, which I liked because it was not much different, but it showed “how far” you were from the correct exposure. It is also intensely pretty and black, but all in all, more of the same, more modern, more “80s”.

Pentax was not averse to trying new solutions. They were among the first (the first, sometimes, but I don’t want to research too much now) to implement automatically returning mirrors, built-in light meters, autofocus (with the poor ME-F). They tried some bad things too  – the aforementioned dials, maybe, K2’s ISO wheel – which I really like but it’s prone to faults).

In MF matters, the Pentax 645 and 67 are quite unique in their own right.

Pentax cameras in general all fell built for being used. They don’t clutter with control or functions (not even the MZ-S, despite it’s a long time since I used one). They feel good in the hand, they are quick to operate. They feel premium built, in fact they kinda are. They stand a beating. They can be paired by good glass as a norm up to excellent.

They do not break records for autofocus speed or number of frames though, but this adds little to the pleasure of using them.