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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
06-09-2016, 01:47 PM
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Hi everybody, I'm new here.
So I'm a proud new owner of an old Pentax ES in pretty respectable condition. I ran a quick film through it yesterday to check if everything was in working order, and came across some very weird behaviour. Let me elaborate:
The ES features open-aperture metering. What this means is that a few lenses have a lever that allows the camera to mechanically sense what f-stop the lens is set to, so you can meter wide-open. Which is great and all, except none of the lenses I have support this feature.
Now what happens when you set the camera to auto exposure and snap a photo WITHOUT one of these fancy lenses is a little annoying: the shutter just stays open forever. You have to twiddle the exposure dial, or activate the DOF preview, for the shutter to close and the mirror to come back down.
I came across this snippet in the manual:
 Quote: "[…]the reflex mirror will be blocked up for safety[…]" What does that even mean? Why would this be a useful feature? The manual only mentions the mirror, not the fact that the shutter also stays open.
Has anybody else experienced this? Is my camera working the way it's supposed to be working or is this a bug?
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Oh and while I'm at it, there's one more thing: with exposures of 1/1000, I noticed that the left edge of the frame tends to be underexposed.
Here's a photo at 1/500:
And here's a photo shot at the same EI at 1/1000:
Notice how the top of the frame in the second photo disappears into blackness. I'm guessing that's a shutter issue, but is there any way to fix this myself? (Also notice how the second image is actually brighter than the first, even though I opened the aperture by just one stop. Probably an inconsistent shutter, since I'm pretty sure it's not the lens' fault.)
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