That Classic SLR Design - It Aint Broken Yet

[Myrdhinn]

Gotta love that old Pentax "takumar" glass ... in the day arguably some of the finest glass ever made and still as good as lot of the current canon/nikon line.

 

[KCLow]

Just got back my roll of B&W shot thru SME Takumar 50mm/1.4 & Electro Spotmatic.

You are right, with landscapes, extremely sharp from point to point. With portraits, love the ability to shoot night scenes without a flash, coupled with narrow DOF gives beautiful background blur.

However, the narrow DOF also means it is alot less forgiving in terms of focus. A couple of shots at f1.4 were out of focus/wrong focus, especially when trying to focus on a 30 year old camera compared to more modern manual focus cameras.

Maybe a better focusing screen will help?

 

[kelvinang]

Just got back my roll of B&W shot thru SME Takumar 50mm/1.4 & Electro Spotmatic.

You are right, with landscapes, extremely sharp from point to point. With portraits, love the ability to shoot night scenes without a flash, coupled with narrow DOF gives beautiful background blur.

However, the narrow DOF also means it is alot less forgiving in terms of focus. A couple of shots at f1.4 were out of focus/wrong focus, especially when trying to focus on a 30 year old camera compared to more modern manual focus cameras.

Maybe a better focusing screen will help?

I find focusing on my Spotmatic II a little more difficult than my MX. Besides the darker viewfinder, the Spotmatic II also uses a microprism focusing screen whereas the MX uses a spilt-image with microprism collar combo. In some situations the split image helps greatly such as when there's little light. As far as I know, Spotmatics doesn't come with split-image microprism collar combo focusing screens except a few which were ordered customised by the customers.

The lens also probably doesn't perform too well at wide open apertures, so that could contribute to overall softer look.

Nice camera set, btw, and at an excellent price.