Pentax Spotmatic SP II

Halfway up a fire road at first light, a sweater under one arm and a coffee going cold, you frame a ridge line, push the meter switch on the side of the lens mount, and watch the needle settle. The Spotmatic SP II does not hurry you. That switch stops the lens down to your taken aperture and wakes the CdS meter at the same time, so what you read on the needle is exactly what the film will see. It is a slow, deliberate way to work, and it suits a body that feels milled rather than assembled, every control moving with the same weighted resistance.

This is late-period Spotmatic, the 1971 to 1974 refinement of the Spotmatic line that put Pentax in millions of hands. It is an M42 screw mount, which means lenses thread in rather than bayonet, a half-turn instead of a click. The reward is access to one of the largest lens catalogs in 35mm, much of it cheap and good. Takumars in particular live here, including the Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4 with its thoriated element that has yellowed with age and earned the radioactive nickname. The viewfinder is bright for its day with a central microprism for focusing, and the match-needle on the right side is the whole user interface. Center it, shoot. No aperture-priority, no program, no electronics to fail. Wind is short and firm. The cloth focal-plane shutter runs from a full second to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, and it sounds like a soft mechanical cough rather than a slap.

What people love is the build. These were assembled when Asahi Optical still over-engineered everything, and a clean SP II today feels tighter than cameras costing five times as much. It was a common first serious camera for students in the seventies because it taught exposure honestly. You set the aperture, you center the needle, you learned what light did. Travel shooters and street photographers still carry them for the same reason, plus the fact that a working body and a Super-Takumar 55mm can be had for the price of a nice dinner.

The honest weakness is the meter, and it is twofold. The CdS cell wants a 1.35V mercury battery the world stopped making, though the body uses a bridge circuit that balances at the needle's center, so a modern 1.5V silver-oxide cell reads correctly, and the real risk is a cell that has simply faded with age and reads nothing reliable at all. Stop-down metering is clumsy in changing light too. You are constantly toggling that switch, and in dim scenes the needle gets lazy. This is where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app does the job the body no longer can. Treat the SP II as the meterless mechanical camera it has effectively become, place your shadows where you want them, and it will hold that exposure all day on a shelf battery or no battery at all.

Cross-shopped against a Minolta SR-T or a Nikkormat, the Spotmatic wins on glass value and loses a touch on metering convenience, since the rivals offered more convenient open-aperture metering on the bodies that had it. People still buy it anyway. Pick up a clean one and you understand why nobody bothered fixing what was not broken.