Pentax ME-F

Picture a parent at a kid's soccer game in 1982, squinting at a green arrow in the finder, waiting for the camera to tell them the focus is right. That was the pitch. The ME-F was Pentax taking the existing ME Super body and bolting on a focus-confirmation system, and when you paired it with the right lens it formed the first production autofocus 35mm SLR system. That lens was a special motorized AF zoom, the 35-70mm f/2.8, carrying its own focus motor and its own batteries in the barrel. Almost nobody bought it. So in practice the ME-F is an ME Super with a focus light, and the body itself runs on the same pair of LR44 button cells as the Super.

Strip away the autofocus story and the camera underneath holds up. The body is small and light, one of the more pocketable K-mount SLRs ever made, with that smooth Pentax wind and a viewfinder that is bright and uncluttered. Focusing is on a split-image and microprism collar like every other manual SLR of the era, and it does the job. The shutter is electronic and vertical-travel, running from a long 4 seconds up to about 1/2000, with flash sync around 1/120. It is aperture-priority at heart. You pick the f-stop, the meter picks the time, and a column of LEDs down the right side of the finder shows you the chosen speed.

Here is the catch. The ME-F will not fire without power, and the only fallback is a mechanical 1/125 marked on the ring plus Bulb. That is it for shooting with a dead battery. The center-weighted meter reads open scenes well enough, but it is biased to the middle of the frame, so a backlit subject or a snow field will fool it. For those, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows where you want them and set the aperture deliberately, instead of handing the whole decision to the body's center-weighted cell.

Build quality is the usual early-eighties mix of metal chassis and plastic top plates. It feels good in the hand, but the electronics are the weak point, and a dead ME-F often stays dead because parts and repair knowledge for the focus-assist circuitry barely exist. The push-button speed selection on the related ME Super was always fiddly, and the ME-F inherits that fussiness.

Today the ME-F sells cheap and sits in a strange spot. Collectors want it for the historical footnote of early SLR autofocus, while shooters who just want a compact K-mount body usually grab the plain ME Super and skip the AF baggage. If you find a clean one that fires reliably, you get a light aperture-priority camera that takes the same excellent Pentax K glass as everything else in the system. Carry spare cells, do not expect the focus arrows to do much, and shoot it for what it is. A small, well-made ME Super with one extra trick almost nobody ever used.