ASAHI PENTAX K1000, Another 5 buck camera

On my last thrift shop expedition I found this Pentax K1000. It is probably from about 1976.

When I got home and opened it up I found that a leaky battery had dissolved the lead from the battery box.

The battery box contact is stainless steel and the wire had been crimped in place. It wasn't possible to open the crimp, it's too small to work with.

There is a product made for repairing the defroster grids on car windows, it's a conductive paint product. I used it to repair the wire and it worked great, the meter is fine now.

I ordered the material to make new light seals and a mirror damper, once I install those the camera will be shooting again.

My first SLR was a Canon FX in 1967 for $150 on sale at the local college town camera store. I think my brother and I went together on it.

About ten years later it was joined by a black FTBn; by then I had a few more lenses for them.

A few years later I got seduced by the compact dimensions and the OTF metering of the Olympus OM series, so I sold off the Canons and got a couple of OM2ns. Also traded a VCR for a Mamiya C330 (too bad good scanners for 2-1/4 film are so danged expensive!)

The year all that stuff was stolen, Canon introduced the EOS camera line. I met their EOS engineering leader and he showed us the various internals of the camera and lenses, including the ultrasonic focus motor.

Finally, a decade after that meeting, I got back into SLRs with an EOS Rebel. Eight years later, switched from my EOS film bodies to EOS digital. Still have one lens from that original EOS Rebel purchase, though.

I still have my small Petri 34mm camera. They went out of business many years ago.

So small that they couldn't fit in that last millimeter? Must have been a real pain cutting down 35mm film to fit it. :=)

I had a Petri for many years. Great little camera.

You can adapt almost any classic SLR lens to a mirrorless digital camera like the Micro 4/3 ones or the Sony NEX.

Is there a forum or link for that? I've asked at stores before if you can use an SLR lens on a digital camera and the answer has always been no.

You can do it if you can get an adapter.
But manual focus lens won’t have metering/automation.

And the focus length is going to change on you because the digital sensor is 2/3 the size of what was going on with film.
A 70mm lens on a 35mm camera acts like a 105mm lens on a digital. Confusing huh

Well...it depends. Some SLR lenses work on digital SLRs (DSLRs) with adapters, and some work without even an adapter, although you might have to focus manually and give up some exposure automation. I think most Pentax SLR bayonet-mount lenses can be used on Pentax DSLRs, and the old Pentax screw-mount lenses will work with an adapter. Nikon lenses will still fit Nikon DSLRs. Minolta autofocus SLR lenses will fit Minolta and Sony DSLRs with no loss of functionality. On the other hand, old manual focus Canon and Minolta lenses will not mount on Canon and Minolta DSLRs without optical compromise.

Almost any SLR lens ever made (as well as lots of great rangefinder lenses) can be adapted to a Sony NEX with cheap adapters available on eBay. You will have to focus them manually, however, and you can't control the diaphragm with the camera (you have to set aperture on the lens).

It's probably not worth messing around with adapters unless the lens is of very good quality and hard to replace with a modern lens. Generic zoom lenses for old SLRs were usually junk even when they were made, IMO.

If you tell me what lenses you have, I can probably tell you whether they are worth using on digital.

There is an enormous amount of info on the net about adapting lenses. Just Google: "Adapting SLR lens to digital."

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