[soly]

Hi,

I've always been a point and shoot kid, but recently I was sorting through some of my Dad's old things and rediscovered his ME F. I was pretty young when he got it, but remember it a bit. IIRC he had the autofocus lens, but ended up returning it as it was pretty much useless and got a 50mm lens, a flash and a few other bits in exchange.

As you can expect for someone who wanted autofocus this setup wasn't ideal and the camera was hardly ever used. I doubt he took more than 3/4 rolls of film with it. It's basically been in a wardrobe, untouched, for 30+ years.

Anyway, the camera peaked my interest and I decided I'll give it a go. After managing to find how to open battery compartment (before I found the instruction book) I opened it to find the batteries had leaked and caked up. So I cleaned the battery compartment (wrongly it seems now I've done a bit more research).

But I wasn't confident the electronics would work, so I've been looking at ways to use the camera fully manually. 'Sunny 16' and 'f8 and be there' look like good starting points.

It seems like I would be limited to using 100/125 ISO film as this is the only manual setting (using 'Sunny 16').

So my question is this - are the Exposure Compenstion settings on this camera 'mechanical' or 'electronic' - ie. could I use 1/125s shutter speed with 4x compensation giving a shutter speed of 1/500s without batteries?

This is basically because I've read 400 ISO is better suited to UK daylight.

Any other tips would be appreciated.

[I'd still appreciate an answer to this in case of electronic/battery failure, but I've since put in new batteries and the electronics seem to be working fine. I've 2 rolls of Ilford FP4 B&W 125 ISO and 11 days in Portugal starting on Monday and raring to try the ME F out.]

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[Swift1]

So my question is this - are the Exposure Compenstion settings on this camera 'mechanical' or 'electronic' - ie. could I use 1/125s shutter speed with 4x compensation giving a shutter speed of 1/500s without batteries?

The exposure compensation is all electronic. Mechanically, you only get 1/125.
Also, 4x exposure compensation would result in 1/30s shutter speed.
Why not try some batteries in it?

[kayakfari]

You get B and 1/125 without batteries. The ME series were the first electronic SLRs to use push buttons and your ME-F will (slowly) autofocus with the matching 35-70 2.8 lens. It was the first AF SLR in production!

[stevebrot]

So my question is this - are the Exposure Compenstion settings on this camera 'mechanical' or 'electronic' - ie. could I use 1/125s shutter speed with 4x compensation giving a shutter speed of 1/500s without batteries?

Welcome to the Pentax Forums!

Exposure compensation is done through the meter and is always battery dependent on all cameras that have it. Notice that it is in part of the same component that sets the ASA(ISO) film speed. It works by simply biasing the meter output. As for "mechanical" vs. "electronic", your camera is fully battery dependent with the exception of the "125X" and "B" settings. Those settings work even when the battery is dead or missing. Sadly, there is no meter and no exposure compensation without a battery.

If you want to use your ME-F as a fully manual camera, you may do so with any speed film you wish, but exposure functionality will be extremely limited with only one shutter speed.


Steve

[soly]

Many thanks for the replies, especially for pointing out I had the exposure compensation figured out the wrong way round. That could come in handy.

Hopefully it's going to be fine with batteries.

I'll see how it goes.