best meter ever in an SLR camera

John_Nikon_F said:

Yes. As long as the eyepiece has the vertical slots that were originally meant for the accessory shoe. The only thing you will have to do is slide the adapter up a little to get the back open. Said adapter also works on Minolta cameras.

-J

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Excellent! My only worry is that Pentax has TWO right angle viewers; the one I have fits my K mount gear, including DSLRs K 10 and K 5. I'll have to see which cameras the other one fits, that is whether there is a difference between the eyepieces of the M 42 and the K mount cameras.

BTW, the RF adaptor I have also fits the Olympus OM cameras; the adaptor for those cameras is often cheaper than the Pentax RF adaptor. Go figger!

PentaxBronica said:

I've always been quite taken with cameras which have a meter readout on the top plate, as well as in the viewfinder. ...
So far the Nikkormat FTn, Pentax SV (with clip-on meter) and Canon FX are the only mechanical bodies I've tried with this. The Pentax Super A tells you the shutter speed, and naturally the AF bodies like the SF7/SFX and so on have a top LCD.

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Topcon Super D, the world's first commercially available TTL metering camera, also had meter indicator needle on top plate.

GRHazelton said:

Excellent! My only worry is that Pentax has TWO right angle viewers; the one I have fits my K mount gear, including DSLRs K 10 and K 5. I'll have to see which cameras the other one fits, that is whether there is a difference between the eyepieces of the M 42 and the K mount cameras.

BTW, the RF adaptor I have also fits the Olympus OM cameras; the adaptor for those cameras is often cheaper than the Pentax RF adaptor. Go figger!

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Pentax also sold one for the 645 camera series, and likely for the 67 as well. Of course, as time went on the finder window changed so the right angle finder became more specific. Something about making some money off the accessories.

Pioneer said:

Pentax also sold one for the 645 camera series, and likely for the 67 as well. Of course, as time went on the finder window changed so the right angle finder became more specific. Something about making some money off the accessories.

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Right.

I have a 645n kit and, since I like close up and macro work, a set of tubes and the excellent 120 macro lens. Since I don't really care to lie down for little critters or small low lying flowers, I bought the 645 right angle finder. Unlike the angle finders for the K cameras, the 645 finder attaches with a rather fine pitch thread. Every time I use it I worry about cross-threading the darn thing, which could be an expensive repair! What was Pentax thinking????

Making money on accessories: I have the AF 400 handle flash, TTL with the LX and the 645. Versatile, powerful, 102 watt seconds, wonderful results. I also have the 6 C cell external pack, which furnishes high voltage to the flash, and gives really fast recycle and far more flashes than the 6 AA cells in the handle module. Of course this flash won't work TTL on my digital K 10 or K 5, although using its sensor gives good results.

The AF 540FGZ which WOULD work on my DSLRs, if I owned it, takes a 6 C cell external pack, which I understand furnishes the same HV as does the one for the AF 400, but the plugs connecting to the flashes are different! Sooooo....if I buy the AF 540FGZ I could buy its TR Power Pack III for $140, or butcher the connector on my AF 400 Power Pack, or kludge some sort of adapter. Grrrrrr......

While I'm griping, the first Pentax DSLR accomplished flash TTL by reading off the sensor, just as film camera TTL flashes read off the film. Then they changed to the PTTL, with a pre-flash. Did Canon and Nikon do similar things? What was the problem with reading off the sensor? My LX and 645n with TTL flash off the film, gave and give excellent flash performance. As does my Olympus OM 4 with its dedicated flash units with TTL.

Sorry for the grousing. I've been working on taxes......

GRHazelton said:

While I'm griping, the first Pentax DSLR accomplished flash TTL by reading off the sensor, just as film camera TTL flashes read off the film. Then they changed to the PTTL, with a pre-flash. Did Canon and Nikon do similar things? What was the problem with reading off the sensor? My LX and 645n with TTL flash off the film, gave and give excellent flash performance. As does my Olympus OM 4 with its dedicated flash units with TTL.

.

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Film camera flash TTL worked when you read the light off the surface of the film...one consideration was that generally negative emulsions were different surface reflectivity than transparency emulsions. Most folks didn't seem to notice that, but I had measured surface reflectivity with a spotmeter and seen the general neg vs. transparency differences across the brands of film that I used. In general, negative films well tolerated overexposure, and in fact did better to avoid muddy colors with more exposure, so the fact that their emulsions were darker was beneficial!

The problem with reading the surface of the digital sensor is that the shiny surface reflectivity of the sensor itself causes issues, so they had to reinvent TTL flash readings. It sounds like Pentax implemented something like film TTL and discovered the flaws of that approach, whereas it seems that Canon and Nikon discovered early on...I have not read if either had early digital cameras using film-like approach and soon abandoned it. But anyway we now are stuck with the ideosyncracies and somewhat unpredictability of eTTL and dTTL and iTTL and pTTL as a result of the digital sensor reflectivity.

[Off Topic]

TTL flash systems.
I can't vouch for Canon or Pentax, but Nikon has/had 3 diferrent TTL flash systems.

1- TTL film technology. It started as a plain straight forward system with the F3/FG. FG has already the standrad Nikon shoe with central contact plus 3 other contacts.
It developed to be a 3D multi-point flash system later with the F90 series and all subsequent film cameras are based on this one.

2- D-TTL Used on the 1st generation D1 series and D100. Not a true TTL at that as exposure measurement was taken before the shutter opens.

3-i-TTL current system Used in D2 and onwards. Also on F6.

You can read all about it here: http://www.scantips.com/lights/ttl.html

[/Off Topic]

GRHazelton said:

Excellent! My only worry is that Pentax has TWO right angle viewers; the one I have fits my K mount gear, including DSLRs K 10 and K 5. I'll have to see which cameras the other one fits, that is whether there is a difference between the eyepieces of the M 42 and the K mount cameras.

BTW, the RF adaptor I have also fits the Olympus OM cameras; the adaptor for those cameras is often cheaper than the Pentax RF adaptor. Go figger!

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AFAIK the one for the M42 bodies will fit the original K series (KX/KM/K2/K1000) but everything later uses the one for the M series bodies. They were supplying exactly the same viewfinder cover with the final MZ-series film bodies as they did with the ME in the late '70s, it was probably the final thing to have "Asahi Pentax" moulded in while the bodies had dropped the Asahi lettering from the top plate years before.

I usually use the SV without the meter as in my experience it's only marginally more accurate than the MK1 eyeball method! As it isn't TTL you don't really know what it's pointing at, and if you use longer lenses then it gets even worse. It'll get you close enough, but so will Sunny 16 once you learn what to look for.

I'll echo Matt's observation that cameras with meter read outs on the top plate being very convenient. Add to the list Rollei 35, S, and T. (Not the E versions)

Also any camera with a CV meter in the accessory shoe. Love this meter on my M2.

Ricardo Miranda said:

[Off Topic]

TTL flash systems.
I can't vouch for Canon or Pentax, but Nikon has/had 3 diferrent TTL flash systems.

1- TTL film technology. It started as a plain straight forward system with the F3/FG. FG has already the standrad Nikon shoe with central contact plus 3 other contacts.
It developed to be a 3D multi-point flash system later with the F90 series and all subsequent film cameras are based on this one.

2- D-TTL Used on the 1st generation D1 series and D100. Not a true TTL at that as exposure measurement was taken before the shutter opens.

3-i-TTL current system Used in D2 and onwards. Also on F6.

You can read all about it here: http://www.scantips.com/lights/ttl.html

[/Off Topic]

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Since we're covering implementations...let's cover Canon's

1. TTL came out on the Canon T90 film camera, about a decade after Olympus introduced TTL in the OM-2
2. ATTL also out for film cameras, but has been assessed as offering little that the TTL could not do. The original purpose of the A-TTL preflash in certain modes was to provide information to the flash out of range warning light in early EOS cameras via a preflash reading.
3. ETTL came out for the Type A flash compatibility bodies which support ETTL. The Canon Elan II/50 camera in 1995 were the first to support ETTL, so interestingly while ETTL is often attributed to digital, its launch was a full six years earlier on a film camera -- before Canon came out with their first digital camera!
4. ETTL-II came out in 2004 as an improvement upon ETTL

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wiltw said:

Film camera flash TTL worked when you read the light off the surface of the film...one consideration was that generally negative emulsions were different surface reflectivity than transparency emulsions. Most folks didn't seem to notice that, but I had measured surface reflectivity with a spotmeter and seen the general neg vs. transparency differences across the brands of film that I used. In general, negative films well tolerated overexposure, and in fact did better to avoid muddy colors with more exposure, so the fact that their emulsions were darker was beneficial!

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You might be interested to know the patents on OTF prior to the first commercial implementation of this in the OM2 as published in this excerpt from May 1976 Modern Photog magazine. It also documents the tests that others conducted on the reflectivity of various films where they concluded that the difference was negligible.



Note that the OM2 utilized OTF metering only in AUTO aperture mode while two CDS cells in the VF was used for metering in manual mode.