Pentax MG

Put a Pentax MG next to a Canon AV-1 and you have two of the early-eighties cameras that introduced a generation to aperture priority. They were near-contemporaries, the AV-1 from 1979 and the MG from 1981, aimed at the same buyer: someone who wanted a real SLR but was scared of full manual. Canon sold the AV-1 as the one-dial camera. Pentax answered with the MG, smaller in the hand, lighter, and locked to the K mount that already had more lenses behind it than almost anyone else. If you came up shooting in the early eighties and your parents bought you a real SLR, there is a decent chance it was one of these two. Pentax usually won on glass.

The MG is an aperture-priority automatic and not much else. You pick the f-stop, the body picks the shutter speed somewhere between about a full second and 1/1000, and a column of LEDs down the right side of the finder tells you what it chose. There is no manual mode in the normal sense, just a 1/100 sync setting and a B for long exposures. That sounds limiting because it is. You give up control and in return the camera stops asking you questions. Center-weighted meter, GPD cell, quick and honest in even light.

The finder is plain and usable, a split-image center with a microprism collar, bright enough for the f/2 and f/1.7 lenses people actually mounted on it. The body is mostly plastic over a metal core, light enough to forget in a jacket pocket, and that lightness is the whole pitch. Loading is normal swing-back stuff. The shutter is a quiet electronic vertical-travel metal focal-plane unit, not a loud camera, and the K mount means you bayonet on anything from a 28mm SMC Pentax-M to a fast 50 and the meter just works.

Here is the honest weakness. The MG is electronic to the bone, so a dead battery is a dead camera. The only mechanical fallback is that 1/100 sync speed and bulb, which is your emergency mode and nothing more. The light seals in the back have usually crumbled to tar by now, and the LED meter readout, while fine, is coarser than the match-needle precision of a pricier body. This was never a flagship. It was the cheap seat in the Pentax lineup, sold below the ME and ME Super, and it shows in places.

But cheap is the point, and it always was. The MG is one of the least expensive ways into the K mount, and the K mount opens onto decades of good, affordable Pentax and third-party glass. People cross-shop it against the AV-1 and the lower Minoltas, and the MG wins for anyone who already owns K lenses. When you hit a backlit portrait or a snowy street that fools the center-weighted meter, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows where you want them, and pick the aperture to match instead of trusting the body's average. Set the f-stop, let the MG handle the rest, and shoot.