The Film Retriever

This is a review of the Pentax Spotmatic SP. I base this review on the three months period I spent with this camera and the two test films I shot. The first Spotmatics reached the store shelves somewhere in 1964 and it was a step ahead from the previous Pentax SLR's, the H3v. The Spotmatics were very well received and gave the M42 mount a real boost. They were well made, quite elegant in appearance and very reliable. The Takumars lenses made for them were, in a word, outstanding. Not only for the build and performance standards of that time but even by today's standards. The Spotmatics placed Pentax firmly in the top 5 camera manufacturers and even with the introduction, almost a decade later, of the K-mount, the first line of the K-series were more Spotmatics than anything else. This camera has been a charity shop find; people thought that it was broken as it appeared to have been jammed. Always read the manual, it clearly says that when stopping down to take a meter re...

As always, i will start with the usual disclaimer that I am not a point&shoot compact kind of person. So this review is probably very scatty and highly subjective. I got this camera in a car boot sale, it was sold to me for £1 and got it in order to sell it on and make some money to invest on other cameras. I shot half a film with it (removed it and put it again on the Spotmatic SP) the results were good and this is where the story ends really. This camera is the update to the first Olympus mju-1, featuring some improvements to the size (this is smaller), lens (it has a faster 35 f/2.8) and features (adds spot metering). As with every compact, comes the trouble of having to disengage the auto-flash each time you switch on the camera. The lens is quite nice and contrasty, got some lovely pictures from it and it is very compact to carry it with you all the time. There are various reports on the internet about this camera mis-focusing, i didn't have this p...