Dear all,
Thank you for welcoming me to your fine forum. For full disclosure I must tell you that until last week I'd never owned or used Pentax equipment before, apart from being a regular Ricoh GR user (which I think comes under the Pentax banner). Please bear with me as I share a story of rookie errors and naivety!
I use Fuji mirrorless cameras a lot and recently became interested in using high quality vintage lenses on my Fuji equipment. I read many online reviews and recommendations for inexpensive but excellent vintage manual lenses, and as I was looking for a 50mm (or thereabouts) with close focussing capability I was drawn to the Super-Multi-Coated Macro-Takumar 50mm f4. I noticed a suitable lens for sale online and ordered it, thinking "I already have an unused M42 to Fuji-X adapter" so eagerly looked forward to the lens arriving so I could try it out. Well, it arrived the very next day and I unwrapped it, got out my Fuji X-T4 went to mount it on the adapter and did a double-take. "This is no M42 lens", I thought, "this is a Pentax K bayonet mount". "Oh damn" I said ... or something fairly similar. I then checked the seller's photos and sure enough it showed a bayonet mount. The lens was in lovely condition (remarkable for a near fifty year-old lens) so I proceeded to curse a lot and order a Pentax K mount to Fuji-X adapter. This would take three or four days to arrive.
While waiting for the new adapter to arrive I looked for every bit of information I could find on the K-mount Super-Multi-Coated MACRO-TAKUMAR 50mm f4 ... and couldn't find much. What I did find was lots of photos showing lenses identical to mine with the same model number - 43912 but with M42 mount. I found absolutely nothing about a lens like mine with the same model number, same serial number range and a bayonet mount. My wife (who had been asking me what all the swearing was about) suggested that perhaps I had the Takumar equivalent of the Harrison watch and that I could sell this unique anomaly of a lens at Sotheby's for millions. Well, call me an old cynic but I thought there must be a much more mundane explanation, little realising that there was, but it would highlight my own stupidity.
In the course of my searches for information I searched for "M42 to Pentax K". Yep, you've guessed it. There on my screen was a photo of a tiny little adapter ring, allowing Pentax users to mount their M42 lenses onto their new-fangled K bayonet mount cameras! I hastily went to my bag, checked my "new" lens and there it was. The lens didn't have a bayonet mount at all but an adapter identical to the one on the screen! With some effort and a few sore fingers later I managed to unscrew the adapter from my lovely lens revealing the M42 mount in all its glory. To say I felt stupid is an understatement.
So, a) I could have used my lens straight away after all, b) I was the proud owner of a Pentax adapter ring I didn't know I'd bought, and c) I'd ordered a brand new K-mount to Fuji adapter which I didn't need. :-(
The adapter arrived the following morning and I've decided to put the Pentax ring back on the lens and use it with the new adapter as if it's a K bayonet mount. That means I still have an M42 adapter I can use with the next Takumar lens I buy. Yes, I feel sure there will be more. I went out into the garden and took a number of test shots of flowers etc., and I can confirm all I read about this lens is true. It's a stunner! It needs a more patient style of photography, and not every shot is perfect, but when I manage to nail the focus it's remarkably sharp and contrasty for a lens this old. I like it! I've attached a couple of those first shots below ... hopefully.
Apologies for the long and tedious first post, but for those of you who have suffered enough to read to the end, thank you, and I promise I will learn more about Pentax lenses here and hopefully not make such a silly mistake again. :-)
Best wishes,
Ian