A Fictional Fable About a Spottie and a Hottie

Okay, okay, okay. I know they're just trying to manipulate your reactions, I know it's calculating, but what can I say, they got me. This one hits me right in the feels, as the kids say. As much for the camera as anything else. Spotties (Pentax Spotmatics) are legendary, legendary.

Sure, I couldn't help but notice a few places where the photo-choreography wasn't quite right, but there was nothing blatant. And may I just say, my ageless inner self very much wants that fictional young woman to marry me. I know we'd get along fine. Except for her non-existence, that is.

They got me. We all have our weaknesses. Toyota: the truck of the Season.

Mike

P.S. One of the many things I'm selling right now is a beautiful SL, the "purist" Spotmatic, the one without a light meter of any kind. It does have a dent in the prism housing, but I'm including a pristine NOS (new old stock) SL top plate, in like-new condition. You'd just have to either know how to swap it out, or find some wizened old workman camera repair guy to do it for you. Or maybe an elf.

I'll put up a picture of it later.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

James Weekes: "I do love the windows in the darkroom."

Mike replies: Yeah! I didn't spot that one before you mentioned it. And the fact that there are color 3R prints hanging from clothespins next to the B&W prints on the drying line!!

I did have removable darkcloth curtains on bathroom windows at one point, in an apartment. What you do is get a grommet tool and put grommets on one edge of the dark cloth, then drive finish nails into the top of the window moulding, and you have a temporary blackout curtain that you can put up and take down. Then, before you move, remove the finish nails. The landlord will never notice the holes in the top of the window frame.

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: Very well done. Plus, it is hip to take photos on film, even more so with a classic like the Spotmatic. So the premise of the story is believable. It helps of course if you have a good product to sell, which is given with Toyota.

Mike replies: The biggest problem with it as a mini-film IMO is that the cuts are way too frenetic, as with most advertising. Or rather, that the rapid cuts are at odds with the the whole languid, pastoral, nostalgic mood the commercial is striving to evoke. Gotta do what ya gotta do I suppose. But I would have preferred fewer scenes with more time devoted to each.

Bob Rosinsky: "I just had my 1964 Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic CLA'd. The Super Takumar 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens is a gem (thorium coating and all). Then a few weeks ago, I bought a minty Super Takumar 200mm ƒ/4. I love shooting with the camera. Mostly I use it on a tripod for shooting trichromatic photography—separate R, G, B filters on successive frames of HP5, then digitized for Photoshop, where I combine the color data to make true color prints. The effect reminds me of the original three-strip Technicolor process that The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind were filmed with."

Mike replies: That's very cool. You must be one of about nine people worldwide who are working in tricolor right now!

AN: "Hey! I also do some tricolor! Are the other seven here too?"

Dennis Ng: "Did not have that ever...but did have a Pentax 67 and should take it out for a walk.... Merry Xmas."

Patrick Perez: "Hey! The Java Jive (AKA Java Dive) and Frisko Freeze are right here in my town, Tacoma, Washington. Frisko Freeze burgers are sublime when they are on their game, but somewhat uneven. You can't be sure what you'll get; sort of like going to see a Bob Dylan concert. Last time I was at the Java Jive was for karaoke with friends and I made the tactical mistake of singing 'MacArthur Park,' which has two multiple-minute bridges where I was left standing on the stage looking dumb(er than usual)."

Mike replies: My friend Dan went to see Dylan recently and he reports that it was a great concert, Dylan in fine voice and articulating well, with an excellent mix of classic and newer songs. And that the venue was surprisingly small and the ticket only cost a hundred bucks!

When you think of it, it's kind of amazing that you can go see Dylan like that, considering he broke out all the way back in "the old folkie days" of the early 1960s. Kinda like being able to go see Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams Sr.

David Drake: "The comment about a window in the darkroom reminded me of a framed print which I used to have in my darkroom. Given to me by my photography mentor, a good friend, it shows a darkroom from yesteryear, like way back before electricity, which is lit by a red glass filtered window. I always thought this would be so cool, and I might try it some day. I just googled it and found the actual image (above)."

Mike replies: I had a B&W TV in one of my darkrooms that had a sheet of rubylith over the screen. It allowed me to watch Redskins (as they were called then, now the Commanders) games on working Sundays. I grant you, not quite as cool as the red window.

J D Ramsey: "OMG, this so resonated since I had a Honeywell Spotmatic back then, with the 50mm lens. And I had the darkroom (no windows) thanks to my parents' generosity when they didn’t have much extra cash. Such a sentimental video, can’t help but bring a smile/tear. Wonderful memories."

Basil Steinle: "Ok, I admit it. The commercial and all the online chatter got me to pull the trigger and buy a Spotmatic. I’ve been on the fence for one for months till now. It will keep my SV company."

Comments

[Albert Smith]

Wow, the timing! I was just watching probably the 500th rerun of Seinfeld and this commercial came on. I have a digital DVR, so I could rewind and freeze frame to see the Spotmatic. An old screw mount SLR and printed photos, perfect. Maybe the trend followers will sell back the Fujifilm X100V cameras they bought up because they were told to and buy Pentaxs.

I'll trade my Spotmatic with the excellent 50mm f/1.4 straight up for one of those X100Vs.

[John Krumm]

That really makes me wonder about the Pentax film project.

https://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/pentax/filmproject/

[Andrew B]

Like that the included grandma's old truck in the driveway.

Imagine the flip side of that ad -- Pentax cameras old/film and new/digital with grandma and granddaughter photographing their old and new (EV maybe?) trucks. Alas, camera companies don't make TV ads anymore, right?

[Jeff Pressman]

This video reminded me of something I saw earlier today about a photographer's "revolutionary" technique. You'll see what I mean. https://fstoppers.com/humor/photographer-revolutionizes-technique-holding-lens-wrong-way-sparks-outrage-and-652252

[James Coleman]

My first 35mm was a (Honeywell) Pentax H1a, very similar to the SL. Used a clip-on light meter. Top shutter speed 1/500 sec (SL was 1/1000, I think). It's probably why I love my K1000, K2 and ME so much. The fingers remember!

[Wolfgang Lonien]

Loved that one - thanks for embedding it, Michael :)

[DavidMac]

No offence but I can’t get on board with this one. Sickly, sentimental marketing promoting self-indulgent US consumerism. Why does a single person and her dog need a bus all to themselves to get around in?

[C Jacobs]

Most of the time when companies want to invoke the retro mood with cameras, they dust off the well used Leica. But this is a Japanese company and they have quite a bit of national pride. But, I suspect they did not want to look like they were playing favorites among the usual suspects. So Canon and Nikon were out, they were clever to pick a brand that is no longer independent. I bet the final choices were Minolta SRT-101, Olympus OM-1 and Pentax Spotmatic. Personally, I would have recommended the Canonet G-III QL1 even though it is a Canon product.

[The Spotmatic works much better than a Leica would IMO. It evokes bygone times much better, because they were legendary in their day but nobody uses one or wants one today. --Mike]

[Dave]

I was wondering when you were going to post this. :>)

I originally found this on Pentax Forums (https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/173-general-photography/463050-has-anyone-else-seen-toyota-christmas-commercial-featuring-pentax-spotmatic.html)

I've already got an SL, so that's tempting, but if I get another film camera, it'll probably be a KX (with mirror lockup) or KM (without mirror lockup), just to have a K-mount camera. I pretty much use my SL for B&W and my K1 II for color.

I look forward to seeing your SL photos.

[Dave]

Ooh, I forgot to mention the windows. Is that red and white dishcloth hanging over the lamp supposed to be a darkroom filter?

At least the shutter sound seems accurate!

[Ned Bunnell]

[The Spotmatic works much better than a Leica would IMO. It evokes bygone times much better, because they were legendary in their day but nobody uses one or wants one today. --Mike]

You mentioned you were going to post a picture of your quite rare SL to sell it here on TOP. Why bother as no one will buy it:)

[Tom Burke]

Didn't work for me. Unless she was naturally very good, most of her images would have been - well, let's just say "not good".

If you detect a bit of disappointment, even a hint of bitterness, in the comment above you're not wrong. This last few days I sorted through several thousand slides from the many years when I was taking such images. The earliest were from the mid-70s, the most recent just under 20 years ago. Over 90% of them were awful. Either technically awful (not too many, and mostly found in the older sets) or utterly uninspired. Currently I've got just over 200 saved for further review, and I'm confident that in the end I'll get down to not much more than 100. Then I'll have them scanned and printed in a photo book.

The ease of digital photography has blinded many of us as to how hard photography used to be. Just getting the exposure right let alone achieving a correctly-exposed image that would be worth keeping was a challenge. I feel that anyone who picks up a film camera today - especially an old one, with none of today's 'making it easy' add-ons - is in for a shock.

[Robert Roaldi]

Somehow I had managed to live this long without ever hearing about "tricolor" imaging. Where have I been?

I think it would be a bit funny to use a Leica or Pentax K-3 Monochrome to do this. Go to all the trouble to build/buy a B&W digicam, only to turn around and use it to mimic a Bayer sensor, albeit using every pixel for each colour. Sounds like a fun experiment though.

[Patrick Perez]

Rob Rosinsky and AN both mentioned they do tri-color photography. I've long thought that a tri-sensor camera with beam splitter(s) a la the Technicolor method could produce better color photographs, and be easier to implement from a technology standpoint than the Foveon approach. The cost of 3 1", 4/3, or APS sensors I should think would make the economics work out.

Don't some of the sensor shift cameras where the sensor is moved by a pixel 4 times to increase resolution also make possible same-resolution but 'purer' color files? That seems like it's solvable in software.

Patrick

[Jack Luke]

In reply to Rob and AN, my partner Laura shot this wonderful tricolour image of her pal, Katariina, at uni.

I was always astonished Katariina was able to sit still enough.

Laura now works as an archivist, so her interest in fussy/unusual processes shouldn't have surprised me.

- https://www.instagram.com/p/BSwKU4LAvyy/

- https://ibb.co/Fq9Lgs3

[Gordon R. Brown]

For Pentax repair service, Eric Hendrickson, a former Pentax service manager, now working in Tennessee: http://pentaxs.com/index.html 

Click on his "About Me" tab to learn about his work experience.

[robert e]

The ad pushed many of my buttons, too, it seems, to the extent that I completely forgot what it was trying to sell. To be fair, any relationship with their products was purely gratuitous and coincidental. You can say the same about most Coca Cola ads, technically, but they somehow manage to do a better job of insinuating their product into the feels. Anyway, a nice reminder of what photography is for, for many.

I agree that a long-gone camera was a better choice than something that survived to become a luxury retro fetish; plus, even in their day, the Spotmatic came to be more associated with amateurs than pros, even if some of those amateurs were celebrities.

The story cleverly exploits both the generational aspect of analog photography (including its recent faddishness) and the considerable personal investment associated with a DIY analog printing project.

[Moose]

TL:DW

They pushed the wrong nostalgia buttons for me. When I'd had enough, I was amazed how much was still to go. I opted not to risk an emotional diabetic reaction.

I'll stick with the British TV show Sex Education. One of the young female protagonists is running around shooting everything, anything, everybody and anybody with an OM film camera*.

I don't fantasize about marrying her, but her two big slab front teeth are getting sexier . . .

* Given to her by a sly guy in a wheelchair who would like to . . .

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I've done a little tri-color. Did it with a digital camera, just took 3 exposures close together and grabbed one channel from each.

This was the first time Prokudin-Gorski's work hit the Internet, and I wanted to see if some of his artifacts happened for the reasons I thought (they did).

Here's my 2001 photo of downtown Minneapolis, across Lake Calhoun I believe, assembled from color channels from 3 separate exposures.

[Very cool. Yup, that looks like a tricolor all right! I guess more people are trying these than I thought. Or maybe you're just another of the nine people. --Mike]

[Dan Khong]

As far as 35mm SLRs go, I think the Spotmatics are some of the prettiest to look at and nice to shoot with.

Their M42 mount allows the use of countless other lenses many of which are legendary in performance. One example is the Jupiter-9, a CZJ copy of the Zeiss Sonnar 85mm/f2, already a legendary portrait lens in its own right.

Even so, the 50/1.4 Super-Takumar is so amazing in delivering bokeh that I often use it on my Canon EOS-RP (which is a cheap and good FF camera) with an adapter. Mirrorless cameras have opened up a whole new world to acquiring and shooting digitally with old world lenses.

[ChrisR]

Another one experimenting with trichromes, plus ICM with redscaled film! I had two Spotties back in the 70s, but swapped to K-mount Pentaxes, now use my ME, MX and LX all the time!

[Gary Merken]

Several reactions to the Toyota ad.

1. The young woman reminds me a bit of the character Claire in the terrific television series SIX FEET UNDER who, during the course of the series, gains interest and skills in photography, and grows up to be a professional photographer. She looks like Claire a bit.

2. As a native of eastern Massachusetts who grew up on candlepin bowling, I've always referred to the bowling in the ad as "big-ball bowling, not real bowling."

3. The full, one-minute version of Amazon's current television ad--produced by a well-known agency co-founded by a high-school classmates--will, I think, "hit you in the feels" even more than the Toyota ad. (Or "spot," as the ad people say.) This version, which has the old women remembering their childhood runs on wooden toboggans, unfortunately isn't run on television.

Here's a link to the full thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmF0bOCa_4Q

[Kodachromeguy]

"nobody uses one or wants one today." Wait a minute. I took a walk through town yesterday morning with my Spotmatic F and the 50mm ƒ/1.4 SMC Takumar. It is compact, easy to use, and does not break. What is there not to love? And I would like to have a Leica fan demonstrate in a print or online where the Takumar lenses are inferior to the L lenses of that era.

[Been done--Herbert Keppler of Modern Photography and later Popular Photography famously compared the Super-Takumar 50mm with the contemporary Leica Summicron. Basically couldn't tell the difference but thought the Super-Takumar had a slight edge.

Another fun fact: for many years the Pentax 50mm f/1.4 Super and Super-Multi-Coated Takumars were loss leaders, sold for less than they cost to make. 80% certainty on that rumor, not total certainty. --Mike]

[Trevor Johnson]

I still have my Spotmatics, in fact a few Pentax 35mm cameras from a black SV to a black ESII, with a number of Spotmatics in between. Including my first one, the SP500 that didn't have a 1/1000th of a second shutter speed. But of course it did, but the speed is unmarked, because it would have been too expensive to manufacture a different shutter. And I have a mint copy of "The Ultimate Asahi Pentax Screw Mount Guide, 1952-1977 2", which ironically, is worth more than any of my Spotmatics. I bought it for £12 from a collector who was selling all his 35mm Pentax gear, about 20 years ago.

And a note to Toyota (I have been buying four wheel drive Toyotas for over 20 years now). Please stop keep making them larger every time a new model comes out!

[Alan Whiting]

I'll check in as another worker in tricolor. I've experimented with different filters and processes; sometimes the result is interesting, though often just strange.

[David L.]

The basement darkroom is so wonderfully familiar. Another appeal to me are the Toyota trucks. I've owned four since 1985, still have two, one is a 1988 and still a daily driver with 253,000 miles.