I recently acquired a pretty nice example of a Pentax K2, a member of the first generation of Pentax’s K-mount SLRs. I paid about $80 including shipping for it, and it’s the black paint version, which looks really nice. The price was below what most of these go for online, and I was assured by the seller that the meter worked. Well, after it arrived I found that it was good electronically, but the ASA ring was not turning. After doing a little research, I put a few drops of light oil around the base of the lens mount/ASA ring, and it then moved like it was supposed to. The K2 is an aperture-priority and manual exposure camera, so I still needed to test it with film before I used it seriously.
I loaded a 24 exposure roll of the FPP’s She-Wolf 100 black and white film (it’s Fomapan 100) and spent a few days shooting with the camera. After I developed the film, I scanned it with my Epson V700, and I’m very pleased with the results. The metering is very accurate, and I know that I can trust the camera to expose properly. Here are a few unedited images from the roll so that you can see.
This brings me back to the title. A used film camera today is likely to be at least 20 years old, and more often than not, over 40 years. The K2 came out in 1975, which makes it 51 years old. Now, for me, 1975 was the year I graduated high school and started college. It’s not ancient history to me, because I lived it. However, to a lot of young adopters of film cameras, it IS ancient history. All too often I see people on Reddit asking if a certain camera is okay to use, or “what is the best camera?” or “is this any good?” Some cameras have aged better than others, and so much depends upon the brand, the way it was used and stored, and whether the new owner knows what they are doing. Old cameras that have been well-kept and stored properly are great. Old cameras that have sat in damp basements, storage units, or dusty hot attics may have a whole slew of problems, or they may not. You won't know for sure until you have the camera in your hands.
To test a camera:
Find out if it requires a battery to operate the shutter. Cameras like the Canon AE-1, Pentax ME, Nikon FE, Minolta X series, all require a battery to operate the shutter and the light meter. If a camera’s shutter is independent of the light meter, all the better. However, that’s not so much an endorsement of those camera as it is a basic step that you should know before using any camera.
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| The Spotmatic only needs a battery for the TTL meter. |
Don’t have a manual? Go to www.butkus.org and you should be able to download a manual. Want to know more about the camera? Go to camera-wiki.org
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| The Minolta X7A requires a battery to operate at all. |
If the shutter works without a battery, then dry-fire the shutter at the various speeds and listen to the sound at each speed. If the shutter is working properly, you’ll discern the different shutter speeds as you change them. If you can open the back of the camera and look through it, you’ll see the shutter curtain (if it’s an SLR) open and close for each setting, which ought to be obviously different at low and high speeds.
Find the proper battery to test your camera, and see if the light meter works. Depending on the camera, you’ll see a +/- display, differently colored LEDs, or a small pointer at different shutter speeds. This is why it is important to have the manual, so you will know if things are working properly. If the meter is not working, check the battery contacts in the camera and clean them with a pencil eraser. If you see corrosion, then, you'll need to clean that off. Make sure that you have inserted the battery with the + side facing the proper direction.
I keep an old roll of film that’s been exposed many, many times as a test roll to see if the film transport works properly as well as the rewind.
Does the self-timer work (if it has one)? I know people get caught up in the “Pentax K1000” for a basic camera, but the K1000 does not even have a self-timer! There are better all-manual SLRs out there at a lower price, such as the Vivitar V2000 or V3800, both of which use K-mount lenses.
Are the lenses clear? Is there dirt in the viewfinder? Older SLRs are prone to having a bunch of dust on the ground glass of the focus screen from the decomposing foam of the mirror bumper. Lenses may have a haze inside, dust, or fungus. You may need to remove the lens and hold it up to the light to see that.
Once you are sure that the camera works, shoot a 24 exposure roll of film with it, and it can be on as mundane subjects as you want. This is to test the camera. Once you are satisfied that it works properly, you can take it on that trip that you planned to use it on. Never bring an untested camera on a trip!
Sometimes you only spot that something’s wrong until after you shoot a roll of film, so thtat’s why the test roll is important. If you are buying from a dealer, they should have tested the camera before they sold it. If you bought it from someone on eBay, then you have to assume that no testing has been done unless it was explicitly stated in the description of the item. Since way too many sellers now use eBay’s AI option to list, every camera is a tool to produce wonderful contemporary images that will delight you. Buyer beware.
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| All-electronic point and shoots are always a gamble. |
A well-maintained camera that is not fully electronic should last a long time. Even now, the first DSLRs are over 20 years old, and by some standards they are e-waste. Some people covet them because of the CCD imaging system. The same rules apply to them - if they were well-cared for they should still work fine, but then you have the to find the batteries and in some cases, small enough capacity CF or SD cards that will work with them. Unless your plan is to make prints larger than 8x12 inches, a 6 MP DSLR is certainly a capable camera. In the case of any digital camera - you can only test them with a battery and a storage card, and again, buyer beware.
