Originally posted by geauxpez Thanks -- that's really what I wanted. Should get along fine with my LX and black ME Super. I had a VERY used black Spottie SP last year and even though I parted with it for a good cause, I can't help but think that I could have bought a silver one to donate instead.
By "plain old Spotmatic", where would it fall in the pecking order? Pre SP?
The "plain old Spotmatic" ***IS*** the SP. The US importer, Honeywell, did not engrave the SP on the top. In the rest of the world, Asahi did engrave SP on top. Other than that, the two are identical.
People tend to refer to the "plain old Spotmatic" only to differentiate it from the Spotmatic F, the SP II and so on. There were four models that clearly bore the name Spotmatic.
The SP500, SP 1000 and SL are often referred to as Spotmatics, but technically, they are not, even though they are, in many respects, identical to the Spottie.
The ES and ES II, were also not technically Spotmatics. There were simply the Pentax ES and Pentax ES II, although everyone knew that ES stood for "Electro Spotmatic", and they looked very much like the "plain old Spotmatic".
Here is a more or less chronological listing of Honeywell/Asahi equivalents
Honeywell = Asahi
H2 = S2
H1,H3 = S1,S3
H1a,H3v = S1,SV
Spotmatic = Spotmatic SP
SL = SL (no meter)
SP500,SP1000 = SP500,SP1000 (low cost models, no s/t, 55mm f2.0 lens)
Spotmatic II = Spotmatic II
Spotmatic IIa = n/a
ES = ES (slightly reworked Elector-Spotmatic)
Spotmatic F = Spotmatic F (open aperture metering)
n/a = Electro-Spotmatic (Japan only, I believe)
ES II = ES II
At about this time, Honeywell left the photographic business and Pentaxes were sold in the US under the Asahi name. There never was a Honeywell Pentax K-1000, for example.
Even today, when Pentax USA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pentax Japan, they continue to use different model names in the US. The newest Pentax, the K-2000 is known as the K-m in the rest of the world.
In the nineties, the ZX series in the US was the MZ series everywhere else.