Pentax MZ-5 (ZX-5)

A second shooter at a wedding works the edges of the room while the lead covers the couple, and six hours in the MZ-5 still weighs almost nothing on the strap. Pentax built it in 1996 with a shutter-speed dial on top, a real one you turn with your thumb, while everyone else was burying that control inside a command wheel and an LCD. Set the dial to A and it runs aperture priority. Because the lens aperture ring has an A position too, leave the ring on A and pick a shutter speed and it runs shutter priority, or set both to A and it runs program. Set a number on each and it obeys. You get a metered camera with a motor inside that still lets you drive both ends of the exposure by hand.

The finder is decent for a consumer autofocus body of the era, 0.8x with about 92 percent coverage and a plain ground-glass screen you can hand-focus on, though there is no split-image or microprism aid to help you. Metering is the part that punches above the price. Six-segment evaluative drives the auto modes, and there is center-weighted and a true spot mode on board if you want to place exposure yourself. The shutter tops out near 1/2000 and syncs flash at 1/100, plenty for fill outdoors but not enough to kill a bright sky wide open. The autofocus is a three-point system, modest by 1996 standards and a half-step behind a Nikon N90 or a contemporary Canon EOS. In a dark reception hall it racks back and forth, and you learn to flip to manual and trust the screen.

This is a K-mount camera, and that is most of the reason to own one. Every Pentax lens since 1975 mounts here, and the good ones are cheap. A 50mm f/1.4 or the little 40mm pancake makes the MZ-5 into a coat-pocket kit for the price of a dinner. It sits in the autofocus chapter of a mount that students and budget shooters have leaned on for decades, so a beginner can start cheap and grow into the glass instead of out of it.

Where it bites you is the build. The chassis is largely polycarbonate, light in the hand in a way that reads cheap next to a brass-topped older Pentax, and the plastic film-door catch and battery contacts are the first things to fail on a thirty-year-old example. It runs on two CR2 cells and does almost nothing without them. No battery, no shutter, no meter. Budget for that when you buy, and carry a spare.

The evaluative meter is the part that fights you in hard light. Point it at a backlit subject against a window and the six segments read for the bright background and shut your face down into a silhouette. The fix is on the camera: switch to the body's spot mode and read off the skin, or take a handheld spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone the shadows should land on, and set the dial yourself instead of letting the scene average into mud. Today the MZ-5 lives in the cheap-end-of-film-SLR bracket, shopped against the Nikon FM10 and Canon's plastic EOS bodies, and it wins that one on the dial and the lens mount behind it.