I made a New Year’s Resolution in 2016 to use a different film camera every month. I did pretty well in 2017, using 10 cameras rather than the anticipated 12. Towards the end of 2017 going into 2018 I somehow “lost the thread” and haven’t used a single film camera since last October.

So I’ve decided to start again and try harder. I still hope to use 12 cameras during 2018, but clearly my former way of naming them (e.g. January Film Camera; February Film Camera etc.) isn’t going to work. Instead I’m going to use a numbering scheme. This is the first: Film Camera 2018/1 and it’s a Pentax ME Super.

It’s the first Pentax camera I’ve acquired. Some old friends from the UK were visiting and we were browsing around in the antique/bric-a-brac stores in Cold Spring, NY. I’d found a couple of cameras, but nothing that really interested me. I was about to leave when my friend came over and, knowing my interest in old cameras, brought me over to a cabinet I’d missed. In it was this Pentax ME Super and SMC Pentax-M 50mm f1.7. Everything seemed to be working and the price was absurdly low.

A Quirky Guy With a Camera has a good review (ME Superb! The Pentax ME Super) of it so I’ll try not to duplicate and focus more on my own impressions.

I liked this camera a lot. It’s small, light and consequently easy to carry around. It offers my preferred aperture priority exposure. There is also a manual exposure option, but I found the need to use two small buttons on the top plate rather “fiddly” and I didn’t try to use it. The viewfinder is large and bright and the combination of micoprism and split image rangefinder in the center made it very easy to focus. A series of shutter speeds appears along the left side of the viewfinder along with a green LED indicating which one has been selected. When the chosen shutter speed is too low the LED turns yellow.

I couple of things I didn’t like: 1) No depth of field preview; 2) I found it difficult to move the control dial from ‘auto’ to ‘lock’. You have to press a small white button and then turn a dial and somehow I struggled to get it to move.

I don’t have much to say about the lens at this point. I’ve finished a roll and sent it off for processing. I’ll have more to say when I get back the results. I’ll also know better whether the camera is functioning as well as it seems to.

Taken with a Sony A77 II and Tamron A18 AF-18-250mm f3.5-6.3.