The Film Retriever

This beauty of a camera was an unexpected gift from my wife. Found it cheap (£15) and thought that I would be happy to have it. And she was right. The Pentax M-series, was Pentax's answer to the explosive popularity of Olympus' idea to miniaturise cameras in the 70's. The Pentax ME/Super and MX are fantastic cameras to have and the immense popularity of the ME gave rise to a number of different models (ME/Super/ME-F/MV etc...). With the exception of the Pentax 110, the ME and it's bigger brother (the ME-Super) are the smallest SLR cameras produced. Indeed it is diminutive but so well made that it impresses you with it's small size and solid weight. Once you view through it's viewfinder, a nice surprise awaits you. The viewfinder projects such a large image that it is a pleasure to look through. Despite not being the brightest viewfinder around (I love the viewfinder on the Minolta X-700) it has big magnification and it is bright enough. ...

Another car boot sale find, i bought it for the lens actually - i need a Nikon lens for my Nikon F4s so the price of 50 pence sounded right to me and i got the camera with it. The camera comes from the late 70's (1979 to be exact) and it was aimed at the inexperienced photographer who wanted to know nothing about exposure but just focus, point and shoot (although you had to select the aperture). The Nikon EM is a diminutive camera, it took Nikon almost a decade to catch up with the trend first started by the Olympus OM-1 back in 1972. With the EM, Nikon presented their E-series lenses, compact in design to complement the EM, FG, FG-20 etc.. The EM is very straight forward camera to use. You turn the selector to B (for Bulb), M90 for a mechanical back up speed and Auto. The camera is compatible with AI lenses (Automatic Indexing) and has it's own dedicated motor-winder called MD-E.  The first impressions when you pick up this camera are very good. Very com...