Pentax SFX (SF1)

A church basement, 1988, and the SFX is firing every time the photographer half-presses, the lens whirring out to find focus on a kid running down the aisle. That whir is the whole point. The SFX, sold as the SF1 in some markets, was the first 35mm SLR with a built-in flash, which for a year or two gave Pentax a feature that Minolta's Maxxum and Canon's EOS bodies did not have. Autofocus it did not invent. Minolta's Maxxum 7000 beat everyone to integrated AF in 1985, and the SFX was Pentax's answer to it rather than a body that got there first.

In the hand it feels like the moment the industry stopped machining cameras and started molding them. The body is polycarbonate, light for its size, with a fat grip built around a single 2CR5 lithium cell and a top deck of buttons instead of dials. You set the shutter with a thumbwheel and a small LCD, not a knurled ring, and the whole thing dies without a battery. There is no manual fallback to limp home on. That is the era talking.

The viewfinder is bright and plain, a ground-glass screen with no split-prism because the camera does the focusing for you. Metering is center-weighted through the lens, fed into program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and metered manual, which is generous for a body aimed at people upgrading from a point-and-shoot. The shutter is a focal-plane unit running from a long 30 seconds up to about 1/2000, with flash sync at 1/100. The autofocus is single-point, contrast-hunting, and slow by anything modern. In good light it locks. In a dim reception hall it racks back and forth and you learn to prefocus and shoot manual.

It anchors the Pentax K mount, specifically the KAF version with autofocus contacts, which means decades of K-mount glass bolt straight on and even today's Pentax DSLRs share the lineage. That is the quiet reason to own one. You can feed it the same cheap manual primes you already have, focus them yourself, and let the meter run the exposure. The program meter averages, though, and a backlit subject or a white dress against a dark suit will fool it. Read the scene with the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadows on the zone you want, and dial that into manual rather than trusting the body to guess.

The honest weakness is that it is an early electronic camera, and early electronics age badly. The LCD can bleed, the AF motor can grow tired, and a body with corroded battery contacts is a paperweight because nothing here is mechanical. There is no CLA that brings back a dead circuit board.

Today the SFX sells for next to nothing, which is exactly its appeal. People skip it for the later, faster PZ and MZ bodies, or cross-shop a Minolta Maxxum 7000 for the same money. But if you want a working autofocus K-mount body for the price of a roll of film and a sandwich, this is the historical footnote you can actually load and shoot.