Originally posted by timw4mail I realize that, I have several M42 lenses.
Since I got my Pentax ESII, also in the Spotmatic m42 body family with your SP-1000, in a $5.00 "broken camera" bin of camera store's liquidation sale, I have found myself shooting my m42 lenses more than I had been before, even though I had been shooting them on Pentax dslrs with adapters and sometimes on a Vivitar m42 body. I've even been adding to my m42 lens collection, which I nearly got out of having 15 years earlier! There is something about the feel of that ESII. The meter doesn't work on it, but I've got an external meter, so for a lot of kinds of pictures that is really no big deal. It's a great thing to have a good m42 camera body in the stable.
I would urge you to try all of these cameras at least once, even if the responses to this thread help you figure out probable favorites/keepers and which ones you want to start with in testing. There really is no substitute for actually using a camera. Sometimes the reviews of others seem irrelevant if they haven't taken into account something about a camera you would like or not like in practice. I don't even know how to describe what it is that I particularly like about my ESII, so how could someone else have steered me to it based on that quality through their comments about it? It is something tangible, but, yet, indescribable to me so far.