Pentax Spotmatic F (SPF)

A photographer on a market street in the morning, light all over the place between shopfronts and shadow, swings the camera up, lines up the needle in the right edge of the finder, and shoots without ever taking an eye off the frame. That last part is the whole story of the Spotmatic F. Every Spotmatic before it made you stop the lens down to meter, the image going dark in the finder while you set exposure. The SPF metered wide open, the way a working SLR should.

The trick was a new lens line. The SMC Takumars released alongside it carry two tabs inside the M42 mount. One is fixed and tells the body how far the lens has threaded on. The other rides with the aperture ring, and the gap between them tells the camera the f-stop. Mount one of those and the CdS meter reads at full aperture, bright finder and all. Mount an older Super-Multi-Coated or plain Takumar and you are back to stop-down metering, thumb on the switch, finder going dim. So the killer feature only works with the right glass, which is the SPF in one sentence: a screw mount straining to do the job a bayonet does cleanly. Pentax knew it. The K mount arrived barely two years later and ended the screw mount for good.

In the hand it is dense, all brass and glass, smaller than you expect and heavier than it looks. The finder is bright and the microprism focusing collar snaps in fast. The cloth focal-plane shutter runs from a full second to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, and it goes off with a soft mechanical clack rather than a slap. Match-needle metering, center weighted, a single needle you bracket between brackets. Film loads the ordinary way, back hinged, no surprises. This is a camera you can run blindfolded after a week.

The honest weakness, mount aside, is the meter cell. These are pushing fifty years old, and CdS cells drift and go lazy with age, slow to recover after pointing at a bright sky. The meter also leans on a mercury battery the world stopped making. People run hearing-aid cells with an adapter or a 1.5-volt substitute and learn the offset, but plenty of SPFs in the wild meter a stop hot or simply do not meter at all. When that cell finally quits, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is how you place exposure, the meter the body used to have. The mechanical shutter does not care; it fires battery or no battery.

Today the SPF sells for student money and gets bought by people who want the open-aperture Spotmatic specifically, not the cheaper SP that came before it. It cross-shops against the Minolta SRT and the screw-mount Praktikas, and it usually wins on finder brightness and Takumar glass, which is some of the best-rendering, best-priced lens stock in 35mm. Buy one with a working meter if you can, but honestly, buy it for the body and the lenses and let the app handle the light.