Pentax LX

Pick one up after a Nikon F3 and the first thing you notice is how small it is. Pentax built a professional system body that weighs less than the pro bodies it competed with, and it still feels dense and solid in the hand, the way a tool packed tight with metal does. The shutter is quiet for an SLR of this class, a low muffled clack instead of the clatter you brace for, and the mirror is damped well enough that you can hand-hold it a stop or two slower than the spec sheet says you have any right to.

The clever part is the meter. Pentax called it IDM, and instead of reading the scene once before the mirror flips, a silicon cell in the base of the mirror box reads light reflected off the film itself, in real time, while the shutter is open. In aperture-priority mode that means the camera keeps adjusting through the exposure, so a cloud passing during a long night frame actually gets metered. It will sit there with the shutter open for minutes if the scene is dark enough. Olympus had pioneered off-the-film metering on the OM-2 five years earlier, but Pentax folded it into a single cell rather than the OM-2's separate finder and film sensors, and pushed those automatic exposures longer, which is the reason landscape and architectural shooters fell for the LX.

The finder is the other draw. The standard FA-1 prism is bright and high, and the whole thing lifts off. Pentax made a waist-level hood, a magnifying finder, an action finder you can use with goggles on. Drop in different screens and you can run a plain matte for fast lenses or a grid for keeping verticals honest. Loading is ordinary K-mount business, the build is weather-sealed against rain and dust, and the shutter runs its faster mechanical speeds without a battery if the cells die in the cold, from the 1/75 flash sync on up to about 1/2000, while the electronics handle the slow speeds down to 4 seconds only when there is power.

The honest weakness is a specific one, and owners know it by name: the sticky mirror. A small rubber damper inside degrades into a gummy mess over the decades, and a neglected LX will hang its mirror partway up or fire erratically on the first frame after sitting. A proper service fixes it, but it is the first thing to check on any used body, and a clean one commits you to finding a tech who still knows the camera.

That off-the-film meter is brilliant in even light and easy to fool in hard light, because it is still averaging a frame that might be half bright sky. For a backlit portrait or a snowfield, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you want, and dial that exposure in rather than trusting the body to guess. Today the LX trades for serious money, cross-shopped against the F3 and the Canon New F-1, and people pay it for the size, the meter, and the fact that a working one still feels like one of the best-built manual-focus bodies Pentax put its name on.