Pentax ES II

A street shooter in fading light, M42 Takumar racked wide open, just turns the aperture ring and lets the camera find the time. That is the whole pitch of the ES II. You set the f-stop, the body picks the shutter speed off its CdS meter, and a needle in the finder swings down the speed scale to tell you what it chose. In 1973 that combination was still unusual: an aperture-priority automatic exposure SLR wearing a 42mm screw thread, the same thread that held a million Spotmatics.

That mount is the catch and the charm. The ES II anchors the tail end of the M42 era, the last gasp before Pentax dropped screw glass for the K bayonet in 1975. So you get aperture-priority auto running on lenses that were never designed for it, communicating exposure through the stop-down pin rather than any electrical contact. The trade is speed. Screwing a lens on and off is slower than a bayonet twist, and you will not match the instant lens swaps a press shooter wants. What you do get is the deepest, cheapest pool of fast primes in 35mm, decades of Super-Takumars and SMC Takumars that hold their own against far pricier glass.

In the hand it is a Spotmatic with electronics bolted in. Same brick of brass and chrome, same heft, but with a stepless electronic focal-plane shutter underneath that runs from a long 8 seconds up to about 1/1000, sync at 1/60. The viewfinder is bright by 1970s standards, with a central microprism collar ringed by the metering circle that shimmers into focus once you nail it. No split-image wedge here, which is the one focusing aid I miss in dim corners. The match-needle readout sits off to the side where it stays out of the frame. Loading is the usual hinged-back routine. The shutter is soft and electronic rather than the hard mechanical clack of the all-manual bodies, which throws people who expect the Spotmatic bark.

Now the honest weakness, the one that haunts every early electronic camera: the ES II leans on its battery for auto exposure and the slow speeds. The meter and the long timing both live off the cell. Here is the redeeming detail, though, and it runs the opposite way from most electronic bodies of the era. When the battery dies you keep a full marked row of mechanical speeds, B and 1/60 through 1/1000, all of them firing without power. You only lose automation and the slow end below 1/60. So a flat cell drops you to a perfectly usable manual SLR instead of one fallback speed and bulb. The cell itself is the easy part: it takes a stack of four small silver-oxide button cells that you can still buy off the shelf, so unlike a mercury-dependent body you never have to chase a discontinued battery. The foam light seals have usually crumbled to tar by now, though, and a proper CLA runs into money because the electronics are fiddly. Buy one already serviced or budget for the bench time.

Today it sits in the affordable-but-underrated tier, cross-shopped against the all-mechanical Spotmatic F and the early K-mount KX. People who want pure manual reliability skip it; people who want lazy auto exposure on old screw glass seek it out. For a tricky backlit street scene where the averaging meter wants to fool itself, read it with the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, then set that aperture and let the ES II find the time. Trust the body, verify the shadows.