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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
05-07-2022, 08:14 PM
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just an update as I've used more of Pro Photo Connection's services: their C-printing is excellent, as good as you'll get anywhere (at least barring an optical print?), and their 4x5 C41 development is done in-house in a dip-and-dunk and spot on.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
03-25-2022, 08:00 PM
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He didn't really say it, but the quote was actually about 640 kbytes :P
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Forum: Repairs and Warranty Service
02-18-2022, 07:58 PM
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I bought some "Camera Light Seal Foam" from amazon and it was totally fine, and I reckon a good bit cheaper than most non-bulk alternatives.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
02-17-2022, 12:38 AM
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pro photo connection is my local lab, I've always been happy with their development and especially their prices, although their turnaround on E6 can be atrocious. I don't get scans as I have a scanner capable of beating the low-res proof scans basic "dev+scan" service comes with, and I'm not paying for serious scanning sight unseen.
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Forum: Film Processing, Scanning, and Darkroom
02-17-2022, 12:31 AM
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of the expired slide films I've shot, I've seen 3 kinds:
-basically fine. a bit of color shift here or there.
-major magenta shift. basically impossible to correct with filters
-totally fogged. I got a huge batch of this stuff for dirt cheap, but shot and processed at box speed it comes back fully blank. I've had some surprising and interesting success shooting it 5 stops (!) overexposed (ISO 3 because it's 100-speed film), and then developing it 6+ stops under in C41 doctored with benzotriazole.
My advice:
if you've got only a couple rolls of each, just use it at box speed shooting non-critical work you won't be crushed to see come back magenta and muddy. If a roll out of a batch comes back magenta and/or muddy, consider cross-processing it for the latitude gain.
If you've got many (10+ rolls) of a given type, only then would I seriously consider "spending" a roll testing the fog, bracketing, etc.
If you end up with film of the third category, you could try starting somewhere like I'm suggesting, but know that dialing in my process took many rolls and good luck finding a lab that will cross process slide film at a -5 stop pull :P.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
02-16-2022, 04:28 PM
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How do you feel about the 150/2.8? My copy seems to be irredeemably blurry, but I suspect that may have something to do with a bad knock it clearly took.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
08-24-2021, 08:36 AM
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nice, your 645 came with the hidden T mode :P yeah, I've had cameras that do this. I don't think it's a good sign for the longevity and accuracy of the shutter mechanism, personally.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
08-24-2021, 08:34 AM
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I don't think his shutter is causing problems only on the first frame of the roll, guys...
OP, how much blank space is there at the end of the roll? If you've got half a frame or more of blank, I'd just try loading with your arrow further forward than what's "recommended".
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
08-24-2021, 08:30 AM
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to be clear, you're not talking about the non-shutter-cocking film advance which takes 3 or 4 winds to pull the leader onto the spool and bring the film into the frame, right? your 4th or 5th wind should have more resistance, lock your advance lever, and set your counter to 1. This is intended behavior.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
08-24-2021, 08:25 AM
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one other thing I'll note is that as your elements get larger (and thus have more surface area to grind to a fine tolerance) your loss rate rises quickly. Imagine you've got a machine that grinds lenses, and it has a 1% chance of ruining a lens per square cm it grinds. when it grinds a lets say 44mm front element for a standard 50mm lens, that means there's 2*pi*0.22 square cm on each side, or 2.8 square cm total. So your machine has (roughly; the curve for this gets further from linear as the loss rate rises) a 2.8% chance of ruining the lens blanks it grinds and having to start over, for a 97% yield.
if instead we're manufacturing a 150mm monster front element for a big telephoto, that's instead 2*pi*1.5*2, or 18.5 square centimeters, giving us something like a 16% loss rate or 84% yield, and that's before considering the optical grinder will likely need to grind the lens blank for longer to grind the larger blank.
Costs rise quickly with loss rate.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
08-24-2021, 08:08 AM
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good catch, LaHo! It looks like someone may have painted over the roller; it almost looks like a rubberized coating or something? Chris, if I were you I'd be gently peeling at that flaking texture of the roller to try to figure out 1) what that coating is, 2) whether I could peel it off, 3) what's under it (i.e. why did they put the coating on in the first place? is there rust or something?). One thing I'd note, though, is that if this is a coating on top of the existing roller, one would expect frame overlap, not "running out of frames", so I'm almost wondering if that roller was someone's attempt at fabricating a replacement from scratch/from an inappropriate part (like a left roller?)
Defective is maybe a strong word for it; these cameras are all old and the non-MLU ones are all very old, and they've almost all lived rough lives. Certainly if you paid near-mint money for it, I'd be looking for compensation, but the reality of it is that most of these cameras on the used market are going to have some warts. I own two 6x7 bodies; my 67's shutter speed detents are worn through (so the shutter speed wheel turns freely and you have to carefully place it on a specific speed for the shutter to fire correctly), its Aperture chain is snapped (common problem), has a shutter pinhole repaired poorly with liquid rubber, and it's mirror return spring is weak (so the mirror doesn't return when the camera is held sideways). My older 6x7 MLU is badly battered and brassed, had a warped back until I gave it some percussive maintenance (now the back is likely even more warped, but at least it opens and closest easily :P), has minor frame advance issues (seems to not be an issue if you activate the advance "firmly"), and jams occasionally! Both of them take great photos and I don't see any pressing need to send either to eric henderson.
out of interest, could you post a picture of the negative, to show the frame spacing this is giving you?
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
08-24-2021, 07:56 AM
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One I'd call out specifically to avoid is the 1980s Takumar 135/2.5 (and probably the entire line of 1980s bayonet Takumars, as Just1MoreDave pointed out, which were a budget range of non-SMC lenses). Despite that enticing aperture, the lens may as well be labeled a "Soft" lens at wide open, and it only really cleans up at like f/5.6, at which point it's a non-smc 135mm and surely you can do better with basically any new lens and most old ones.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
08-01-2021, 01:31 AM
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Surely someone like Hasselblad or Phase One or RED makes more per-unit on their cameras, though.
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
07-31-2021, 02:52 PM
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dang, I could never bring myself to "cheat" on a nameplate like that, but it does look great!
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Forum: Repairs and Warranty Service
07-29-2021, 10:08 AM
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I don't own a k-3, but for the o-ring I suspect you could find a reasonably close replacement by ordering a variety of o-rings and trying them until you find one close. There are lots of listings on amazon that will sell you thousands of o-rings in various sizes (admittedly usually something like 20-30 sizes, rather than the ideal for this which would be at least a couple hundred) for under $20. In general, I'd say "if it fits and the door closes, it's plenty good"
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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
07-29-2021, 08:59 AM
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The Z-1 does have a mediocre viewfinder for manual focus, but it does have focus confirmation, which is pretty nice for walkabout manual focus shooting.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
07-26-2021, 08:52 PM
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basically every interchangeable-lens camera sensor ever made has a protective glass layer on top of it; this is what you clean with a sensor swab. removing that glass leaves the sensor (and the bayer filter on top of it) extremely vulnerable to permanent damage from almost anything. by moving that glass surface off of "directly in front of the sensor", dust on/scratches to the protective glass filter should affect the image less. All of this is assuming the inner box with the sensor in it is cleanroom-sealed or effectively so (so no dust can get in and on the sensor proper) but that seems likely at the price point etc.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
07-19-2021, 10:19 AM
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to Ricoh's credit, they have at least identified a "Unique Selling Proposition" for their hardware; in a time where all other manufacturers are moving to mirrorless, they're doubling down on pentaprism SLRs. Their only competition in Medium Format DSLRs are Hasselblad and Leica, both of which are an order of magnitude more pricey, so there's certainly something there. I'm not sure I'd want to tie MY company to the mast of "the pentaprism is essential to who we are", but it seems preferable to drifting aimlessly, which is what it felt like they were doing before this.
It remains to be seen if there's enough market demand for SLRs to keep Pentax relevant. I'm not super optimistic, Mirrorless systems offer a lot of advantages and the various issues people have with them (e.g. jelly-shutter, lag, battery life) seem likely to improve significantly in the next 10 years, and the things they already do better than SLRs seem likely to advance even further. But I could be wrong! Also, there is something unquantifiable, which mostly doesn't show up in the end result, to be said for the experience of looking through a lens yourself, optically, rather than mediated by a sensor. Who knows, maybe the smartphone market really will cream the mirrorless industry and DSLRs will come out on top (in the market of "specialty non-phone cameras"; if phones swallowed mirrorless cameras I'd obviously expect them to be a much larger market than DSLRs, because "everyone needs a phone")
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
07-19-2021, 09:23 AM
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the pentax MF line would not survive such a spinoff. As it stands, I suspect the 645 line is a loss-leader "halo product" for the cheaper consumer pentax gear.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
06-28-2021, 12:09 AM
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This has not been my experience, at least with cheapo alkaline LR44 cells (mine were sold for powered dog collars of all things and were ~$7 for 10). I've gotten maybe 200 or 300 shots per battery (over the course of a couple months; I _do_ leave my batteries in my camera, generally). Certainly enough that the batteries are effectively 0% of the cost of shooting, but orders of magnitude less than what you're looking at, and that's without a TTL prism (I don't own one, and have no interest in trusting a 40 year old CdS lightmeter when I've got an excellent cameraphone that can spot meter for me).
As for your underexposure issues, there are several possible causes. It's entirely possible your battery was no good. This can both throw off metering as well as lead to fast discharge.
I hope you enjoy your 6x7, they're wonderful beasts
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
06-25-2021, 12:57 PM
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your 645z pictures certainly have a ton of contrast and color to them, but I'd hesitate to call it "bad" or weird or whatever; it's just a style. It's a little out of favor at the moment, I think partly because it makes people think of the olden days of poorly-made HDR composites flooding flickr, circa.... 2008 or so? The images are very graphic and give me a feeling of, like, slide film or a 90s national geographic. I wouldn't necessarily want the files I get "out of the camera" to look like this (I'd suspect it's clipping away some information in the highlights and shadows that I could use) but as a published image, I see nothing wrong with it.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
06-25-2021, 12:40 PM
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I'm very happy with my Pentax-K 300/4.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
06-25-2021, 09:05 AM
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Do you have 100% crops? it's hard to judge sharpness from relatively small images like this. Also, I disagree on the 45 f/4 being so-so on 67, at least my copy! It seems sharper than my 55/4, despite the more severe retrofocal design. I've attached a 6x7 photo (taken at, I think, somewhere around f/8, on TMAX, and developed somewhat poorly) and 2 100% (3200 DPI) crops of the V600 scan. The V600's "real" resolution is something like 2000 DPI on a good day, so I'd bet there's more detail here than we can see (at least in the first crop). These 2 crops certainly do agree with you that the 33x44 area is sharper than the full "6x7", but maybe not massively so.
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Forum: Pentax Medium Format
06-25-2021, 08:03 AM
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I can confirm that Richard is right, the "manual" detent is spring loaded and the switch appears "tilted" when set to "manual" on takumar-era 6x7 lenses.
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