Pentax ME

Pentax shrank the SLR in the mid-1970s, and the ME was the half of that project that you did not have to think about. The MX came first in 1976, fully mechanical, and the ME followed in 1977 as the company's answer to the question of how small a 35mm system body could get without losing the K mount or the bright finder. The MX kept every dial and a match-needle meter for the people who wanted to do it all by hand. The ME threw the shutter speed dial out entirely. What you got back was a camera that fit a coat pocket and asked you for exactly one decision.

That decision is the aperture ring. The ME is aperture priority and nothing else. There is an A setting on the top dial, plus B and a single mechanical fallback near 1/100 for a dead battery, and that is the whole menu. You pick the f-stop, the center-weighted meter reads the scene, and the electronic shutter times itself anywhere from a long 8 seconds down to about 1/1000. A column of LEDs lights up the right edge of the finder to tell you the speed it chose. No needle to balance, no second wheel to spin. For a lot of people in 1977 this felt like cheating, and that was the point.

The finder is the good part. It is bright and big for such a small body, with a split-image center ringed by a microprism collar, the classic Pentax focusing screen that snaps into clarity the instant you hit it. The shutter is a quiet vertical metal unit, a soft electronic clack rather than the cloth slap of the older Spotmatics, and it syncs flash at 1/100. Loading is ordinary 35mm, drop the leader on the takeup spool and wind. The body is light, mostly because Pentax was chasing weight, but it does not feel cheap in the hand.

Who carries one now: students who want automation without a computer, and street shooters who like setting an aperture and a zone of focus and then just reacting. It is the camera you hand someone who is intimidated by an all-manual SLR. The cult favorite of the family is really the ME Super, which bolted manual shutter control back on with two push buttons, so the plain ME often gets passed over and sells cheap. That is the buying case and the catch at once.

The honest weakness is that this camera is only as alive as its battery and its electronics. Two small cells run the entire shutter. When they fade you are stuck near 1/100 and bulb, and a body with tired electronics or a sticky magnet can lock up in a way no amount of mechanical know-how will fix. There is also no manual override for stubborn light, so a backlit subject or a snow scene can fool that center-weighted meter into closing down too far. The fix is to read the scene yourself. Take an incident or spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app, decide where you want the shadows to fall, then set the aperture and let the ME time it, instead of trusting it to weigh a hard contrast scene on its own.