Pentax SLR question

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koffiejunkie

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This is somewhat off topic, but I know we have a few photography enthusiasts among us...

As far as I know lenses from Pentax film SLR cameras will fit and work Pentax digital SLR cameras, albeit without some of the electronic features (auto focus etc.).

Does anyone have experience doing this? My old man has a whole lot of really high end Pentax lenses (bayonet mount, of course) and other fancy adapters and stuff, bought new in the late 70s and early 80s. Would these work at all on something like a K10D?

Now that the old man has finally overcome his fear of anything newer than WordPerfect 5.1 on an amber screen, I think the time is ripe to get him onto digital photography... :D

Thanks
 
I think I found it:

Lenses
A major selling point for the K10D is its standard K mount which will handle even old manual lenses sporting the Pentax fit. This means you can dip into the long history of K mount lenses as well as the new AF lenses and they will all work. The second hand market will be brimming with options and you can even pick them up fairly easily at car boot sales! I tested the camera with a huge old 70-210mm Miranda zoom lens that probably thought it would never see the light of day again. Of course, all automatic functions relating to aperture and focus drop back to manual, but so long as you’re comfortable with that, using old lenses is perfectly viable.
Click to expand...

linky...
 
obviously the performance of the camera will lag quite some way behind the current Nikon, Canon and Sony SLR's. Pentax simply isn't competitive anymore.

Sony's A700 SLR with built-in stabilizer is currently an excellent buy.
 
How many lenses are we talking about?
 
Ten or so that I know of. Three or four of those are the heavily used ones, the rest are for "special occasions." But there are other fittings - filters, adapters of some sort or another, that he would like to keep using too.
 
I suppose its worth keeping them then - there's the bonus that he'll feel comfortable doing everything manually.
 
Sapphiron

Sapphiron said:
obviously the performance of the camera will lag quite some way behind the current Nikon, Canon and Sony SLR's. Pentax simply isn't competitive anymore.

Sony's A700 SLR with built-in stabilizer is currently an excellent buy.
Click to expand...

I suggest you look at reviews of the Pentax K10D, which will give you a different perspective. It is way better than the Canon Rebel series, the Nikon d20 and d40, as well as the Sony. Those are entry level, whereas the K10d is closer to midrange.
 
willie-v, thanks. I have read everything I could find on all the Pentax DSLRs. I'm looking for a secondhand camera, so I need to know what's a good buy and what not.

The K10 is first prize, of course, but it's a touch expensive. And I don't see any second hand ones around yet.

From everything I've read, in the pricerange I'm looking at, an istDL2 or K100D are the best deals. What I have found though is that the RAW-to-JPEG conversion on these older cameras are not the greatest, so you need to use a 3rd party app for that if you're really anal about the quality, but they're very good cameras otherwise, with very colour etc.

The K10D fixes this and I believe there is a firmware update for the K100 series that fixes it too.

I'm going off to the U.S. next week, they're much cheaper there, so I'll look out for a K10D, but I'll probably get a K100D Super.
 
Thanks bwana, I'm definitely going to look into it.

I found one that's pretty well priced:
http://www.yourdigitalelectronics.com/product_info.php?cPath=1&products_id=1809

Not only are they cheap but they have a warehouse in London. Unfortunately they only accept payment by Western Union money order, so that's out for me at the moment. If I don't find anything for a good price over there I'll look into that when I'm back.
 
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