The 10th Camera: Why No Pentax?

The "10th camera," the one not on my Top Ten Favorite Cameras list from the other day, is not an iPhone. I do appreciate my iPhone camera and take pictures with it all the time, but it's not quite there from a technical standpoint. It's perfectly adequate for taking pictures to be viewed on...itself. And for emailing and texting. (And for putting on the blog, maximum width 800 pixels.) But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be as happy with it if I were making even small prints. Although I should try that. I also don't own the latest thing in iPhones; mine is a 7+, released almost exactly four years ago. There's just nothing wrong with it so I haven't replaced it yet.

Oddly, there was, as several people pointed out, no Pentax on my list. I love Pentax, and I've owned and used many over the years. And my experience over a long period of time is that Pentaxians are just the nicest people. From Ned Bunnell, former President of Pentax USA, who reads TOP, to all the people I knew on the PDML, the Pentax Discuss Mailing List, they're typically courteous, friendly, and polite people. IMHO Pentaxians are the brand fans least likely to pick fights, flame, or troll.

My experience with Pentaxes, though, is that none of them were ever quite "just right"...for me. The screwmount Spotmatic is a lovely experience, and few of them are bad, but when it got down to it there's not one specific model that had everything I'd want. I've tried a great many of the K-mount cameras, from the original KX/K2/KM trio all the way to the autofocus MZ-S. The famous MX is lovely, but I prefer aperture-priority autoexposure...which the ME Super has, but the ME Super is not as solid or well-built as the MX. The LX is one of the best cameras of its era, very hand-friendly, and a great size and weight—I own one. But the shutter is like a sharp shot of a stick on a snare drum (I'm exaggerating—it's loud, is all). The loud shutter is that camera's Achilles' heel. I'm sure you remember, though, that Achilles' heel is what led to Achilles' death!

That's sort of the way my experience has been with Pentax...there's always something that holds each one back from being quite all the way right. So what was it with the digital cameras? It was the lack of the lens I needed. For years, all Pentax's digital cameras were APS-C, and yet they didn't ever have an APS-C lens with a 35mm- or 40mm-equivalent angle of view. I stuck it out for a long time but eventually got tired of waiting. (Fuji gives me three to choose from.)

Not only might your "mileage" vary, but your actual experience might vary too—I haven't used or owned every single Pentax, especially many of the more recent digital ones. The full-frame DSLR gets high marks from users.

But all that is why no Pentax appears on my personal favorites list. All of the Pentaxes I've ever used have stayed in use for a few months to a year or two, and I've enjoyed most of them, but none has ever become a real go-to or a top fave.

You know how people always say "that's just me"? That's just me.

The 10th camera
The one I almost picked to be the 10th is the Leica R4. Not a perfect camera by any stretch, and not a "pure" Leica—it was part of the long Leica-Minolta collaboration in SLRs. But my short ownership of that camera, using it with the 35mm and 90mm Summicron-R's I borrowed from Mike Hintlian—was the brief peak of my chosen film technique and "look." The pictures using Tri-X and a yellow filter on the lens and D-76 were how I wanted my photographs to look. Despite using it for only a brief time, I have a whole stack of workprints I made with that gear, and they've been a pleasure for me to look at from that day to this. I'd never nominate the R4 as a top camera of its era or as an eBay treasure, but it's one I remember with fondness.

So the 10th camera has to be the Minolta CLE, a small rangefinder with a very nice little 40mm lens. I don't know how I forgot it the other day. Maybe it was because I'm not really a rangefinder guy—despite the fact that this is the third one on my list of ten—but the CLE and its 40mm ƒ/2 M-Rokkor were so nice. Stephen Gandy has a nice page about it (he's a rangefinder guy). I wish I owned one, but you can't have everything.

Photo by Lordcolus, CC by 2.0

Minolta CLE and 40mm M-Rokkor

Of course I've always gotten comments on gear from other photographers, but that M-Rokkor was the only lens I've ever owned that routinely got compliments from non-photographers. Just reg'lar ever-day ol'-fashioned 'Murricuns. Of all the great lenses I've owned. It happened a number of times.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve Justad: "I had a Leica CL with the 40mm ƒ/2. It now resides in the Boulder, MT, landfill. It was such a POS I could not forgive myself if I sold it to anyone. It was totally unreliable. Focus mainly. It seems the weight of a flash unit, a Visitor 283, would get the prisms(?) out of alignment and then away goes focusing. Maybe someone fixed the problem for the CLE, but I doubt it. I had similar problems with Leicaflex SLs. Unreliable build."

Nicholas Hartmann: "I am looking at a Minolta CLE (in the glass-fronted tchochke cabinet in my office) as I write this. It belonged to my father, who had two of them that he used as walking-around cameras, and one later became mine on indefinite loan. It was my gateway drug to rangefinder cameras: small, light, quick to use, beautifully made, and less intimidatingly Germanic than an actual Leica. The Rokkor 40mm lens was perfectly matched to that camera, producing images that were both sharp and round, if you know what I mean. The CLE stopped working a number of years ago but the lens is still making pictures: fitted with an inexpensive adapter to a Micro 4/3 Olympus body, it is now a tiny but solid 80mm ƒ/2 short tele that works just as well on a digital sensor as it did on film."

Dave Jenkins: "Mike, you have been on a roll with a series of great posts since your 'burn-out' episode. Maybe you should burn out more often. On topic: I have never owned a CLE, but I've had two CLs at different times and consider them one of the most inconvenient cameras I've ever used. Heresy, I know. The 40mm is great, though."

Rob de Loe: "My first proper SLR was Pentax. I owned several, culminating with a nice little Super Program. I still have a Pentax ME sitting in a box somewhere. I like Pentax—always have. To me, Pentax is the Honda Civic of cameras: reliable, not fancy, high quality, gets the job done. I still use Pentax lenses on my Fuji GFX 50R camera, but this time it's Pentax-A 645 lenses. They're excellent quality, and, in true Pentax tradition, no fuss, no muss. They also have a large enough image circle for shifting.

"I don't think I'm a proper Pentaxian because I'm not using Pentax bodies. (Not sure if that's a rule!) But you're right about Pentaxians. The PentaxForums site is a fantastic resource with loads of friendly, helpful people."

Comments

[longviewer]

You're not a rangefinder guy, yet I allowed you to persuade me to try a GX8? The rattle I hear as I shake my head in dismay is nearly as loud as the K100d shutter..

[What, you don't like the GX8? But it's not a rangefinder anyway. Just a mirrorless digital with the viewfinder over to the left instead of in the middle. "Rangefinder style," they call it, right? --Mike]

[Bill Duncan]

The Pentax 35mm Limited Macro is one of the nicest, sharpest lenses I've ever seen! Worked great on the K-5 and K-3... Still does.

[True...I wrote a review of it, which you can see here:

https://www.photo.net/learn/an-optical-paragon/

...But it's not a 35mm-e lens, it's a 50mm-e lens.

BTW Carl also found it too long and wandered away from it after a while, like I did. --Mike]

[Steve Rosenblum]

The CLE remains my favorite rangefinder camera and the M Rokkor 40mm f/2 lens is just wonderful and still a killer deal. I find the 28/40/90mm lens selection just about perfect. If you mount a Voigtlander Color Skopar 28mm f/3.5 lens on the CLE you can easily slip it in your jacket pocket and it is light, compact, and fun to shoot.

[GRJ]

Pentax seems to have had a lot of aps-c zooms that included the focal length you cite. Is your latent anti-zoom bias at work here?

[I don't think we need to get Freudian about it—in any system, a 35mm or 40mm (or equivalent) prime is the basic lens I need because it's the lens I like best. So if a system doesn't have one, it doesn't matter what else it has.

That's not a criticism of Pentax necessarily...just a matter of personal preference. --Mike]

[Richard Tugwell]

I agree - the iPhone doesn't meet my criteria for a favourite camera, but it's more a case of form factor and usability, not image quality. (I have quite a few iPhone images in stock libraries that satisfied their QC process)

[Peter Barnes]

Agree 100% about the CLE, a wonderful little camera. I owned one for six months before it was stolen.

[Christer Almqvist]

Sorry, but I cannot participate in the "Favorite Ten Camera" review. I got my first camera, an Ensign Full View, at the age of eight. I am now over eighty, but I have only had eight cameras in my life. Please advise on how to proceed.

[Dave]

You'd be happy with even medium to large iphone prints. I hope someone schools you on this.

[Andrew Kochanowski]

Pentax K-P is a wonderful DSLR. Small but not too small, built like the proverbial tank. No creaks, no flex, dense feeling. Three adjustable grips. Tactile physical controls. Bright viewfinder. Water sealed. Damped shutter sound.

True, no 35-40mm equivalent lenses. But you can have a tiny 31mm AF equivalent, or a fast 46mm (the f/1.8 FA31). Or a line of small primes or the 20-40 zoom.

Point is, it's as close to a film-like era experience with all the good stuff- finely machined, metal lenses barreled lenses with built in hoods, character, with fast AF or split screen focusing (if you can get your hands on an old Katz Eye screen).

[Aaron J]

You should indeed try making prints from your Iphone. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the results. A couple of years ago I took a Fuji X-H1 (24 MP) with 16-55mm f/2.8, Sony A7Rii (42MP) with 24-105 f/4, and my Iphone SE (12MP) to my local botanical gardens. I was curious what ‘real world’ (not test charts) results I could get from each for my particular photographic interests. So, I framed each so as to match as closely as possible the scene, depth of field, exposure, etc. I minimally processed the RAWS (including from the Iphone) just enough to get similar looks. I then printed at 12x18. At that print size the two dedicated cameras were indistinguishable from one another—that includes nose up to the print. The Iphone wasn’t quite as good and was obviously inferior with nose to print. But, from comfortable viewing distance, the difference between the Iphone and the other cameras was barely noticeable. There was indeed a difference, but I’m confident that if not seen right next to the others, I would have been perfectly happy with the Iphone’s image.

I now use the Iphone 11 with the ultra wide and telephoto lenses. I rarely shoot RAW on it. The computational wizardry has just gotten so good, especially with respect to dynamic range. My only complaint is that I think it tends to over sharpen a bit, and there’s no way to turn it down, even when using third party apps. It hasn’t replaced my dedicated cameras—partly because I simply enjoy looking through a viewfinder. But I also don’t hesitate to use the Iphone and make prints when I don’t have another camera with me.

[John Camp]

If I had to pick my *favorite* camera ever, the one that I most purely enjoyed, it would be a Pentax Spotmatic that I bought in an Army PX in 1967. At the same time, I bought the then-accepted "kit" of lenses, a 35, 50 and 135. I really had no knowledge of photography technique at the time, although I did take an Army photography course, which was a good start. With the Spotmatic's simple metering system and a little experience, you could use the meter as a standard and then deviate from it and get pretty good exposure on almost anything. It was a very good combination of the manual and the automatic, and a perfect learning camera. Of course, I ditched it as soon as I could for the more prestigious Nikkormat and then an F2, 3, 4, & 5 and so on. (Like about a billion other guys, I went to Nikon because of the movie Blow-Up, which suggested that you could take photos of naked girl models if only you owned a Nikon F.) And when I think of it, with all the capabilities of those later cameras, I don't think my photos got particularly better and I never did take photos of naked models. I still have Army photos I look at from time to time, and my first newspaper job, at a small paper in Missouri with no full-time photographer, the Spotmatic probably paid for itself ten times over at $5 a shot that the paper paid me.

[Stephen Scharf]

"I do appreciate my iPhone camera and take pictures with it all the time, but it's not quite there from a technical standpoint."

Mike, with all due respect, you're behind the times with respect to smartphone cameras.

You should try the camera on the iPhone 11 Pro some time...the camera on it is truly amazing. Moreover, it renders absolutely gorgeous B&W photos, too. Is it "there" from a technical standpoint? Absolutely.

Times change...

[Robin Dreyer]

For reasons of circumstance, the camera I first learned with was a Leica CL, close cousin, as I understand it, of the Minolta CLE. It was a loaner, which I gave back after a year or so, when I bought my first Nikon FM, but I loved that camera--its simplicity and size--and the pictures I made with it. From time to time, I look at CLs and CLEs in eBay, but have never bid on one. but I'm sure my experience with and nostalgia for that camera is part of the reason I have felt simpatico with the Fuji X-100.

[Jeff Fleck]

The only Pentax I own or would own is the 6x7. Modelled after the Exakta 66 (Pentacon 6) which I also own, are each what the 35 mm cameras want to be. I stuck with Nikon 35s like the FE2, F3, F100 and wanted Leica, but nothing is as inspiring as looking at properly scanned 120 film, and they are as easy to use as the old 35 mm. I still have my Dad's Voigtlander Vito III which is a beautiful camera in its own right.

[Kodachromeguy]

The CLE was a splendid little camera. Are any still functional? The folks who responded above did not specify if their units work.

In contrast, Spotmatics were uber reliable. My wife still has her 1971 Spotmatic and it's amazing 55mm Super-Takumar lens (complete with its thorium glass).

[Robert Corrigan]

One day Mike, Pentax will make you your goldilocks (D)slr with a lens to match :) The new DFA21 Limited mounted on an APSC model might work ;)

[Roger Bradbury]

Mike, I know what you mean about the Pentax lenses. I've been making a practise recently of setting my Pentax standard zoom to 18, 23 (actually just to one side of the 24 mark) and 50, the maximum focal length. Sometime I make a mental note to crop to the angle of view of a 60mm.

But I would still like a nice compact 18mm prime,(f/2.8 would do) and I've been known to go out with a manual focus 24mm and a flash on a lead so I can run and gun, zone focusing at f/5.6.

The Pentax 21mm is nice, but it's too short/too long for me and the 15mm is only f/4. A used Pentax 24mm f/2 would be nice, but it's not very compact!