Pentax PZ-20 (Z-20)

Put a PZ-20 next to a Canon EOS Rebel from the same year and the Pentax feels like the camera for people who already owned Pentax lenses. Canon had blown up its mount in 1987 and made everyone start over with EF glass. Pentax kept the K mount and told its loyalists they could bolt the manual primes from the seventies onto an autofocus body and keep shooting. The PZ-20 sells that idea hard. It is a 35mm autofocus SLR from the early nineties, light, plastic-shelled, and aimed squarely at the family-and-vacation buyer who wanted the camera to think for them.

The viewfinder is bright enough, with a clean focusing screen and a simple data strip along the bottom, but you do not focus by eye here so much as confirm what the AF already decided. The autofocus is single-point and center of the frame, fine in daylight and slow in a dim restaurant. The body earns its keep on automation. Program mode does everything, there is aperture priority and shutter priority if you want a vote, and the meter is a 6-segment multi-pattern reading rather than the dumb averaging cell the price tag suggests. The shutter is electronic, runs from about thirty seconds down to roughly 1/2000, and syncs flash near 1/100. None of it works without the battery, a 2CR5 lithium, so a dead cell is a dead camera.

Film loading is the autoload everyone shipped by then. Drop the cartridge, pull the leader to a mark, close the back, and the motor walks it to frame one. Build is plastic over a metal lens mount. It will not survive being dropped on stone the way an LX would, but it was never sold to that customer. The grip is deep, the body is small, and it slips into a jacket pocket where the heavier pro Pentax bodies never would.

The honest weakness is what nineties consumer SLRs all share. The electronics are the camera. There is no mechanical fallback, no meterless manual mode that keeps working when a circuit gives up. When one of these dies, it usually dies for good, and nobody is paying for a CLA on a body that sells for the price of two coffees. The 6-segment meter is smarter than a plain average, but it can still get pulled by strong backlight or a large bright field, the way segment patterns do when one zone dominates the frame.

That is where the Zone Light Meter app earns a spot in the bag. The PZ-20 never gave you a true spot reading, so you are stuck trusting those segments or dropping into Metered Manual and guessing. Point the body into a snowfield or a window-lit room in aperture priority and the segments still want to gray things out. Take a spot reading from the app instead, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, and set that exposure. You keep aperture priority and lose the blown skin tones. Today the PZ-20 is a thrift-bin camera, cross-shopped against the cheaper EOS and Minolta Maxxum bodies, bought mostly by someone who inherited a drawer of K-mount glass and wants the cheapest way to put film behind it. For that buyer it still does the job.