Your current set up!

Unimaxium · Nov 14, 2004

My Pentax K1000 still beats all your fancy cameras and lenses and stuff... OK well maybe not...

I also have a 3.2MP Sony Cybershot PSC-D71 (mostly a point-and-shoot)

Unimaxium · Nov 14, 2004

Actually this leads me to a question... when it comes to 35mm SLRs, what more do you get between say a brand-new $2300 Nikon F6 and my 20-year-old K1000? I mean, with some cameras you can have automatic shutter speed and aperture adjustment and metering and focusing and such, while others are totally manual like mine. But what else do you get? What's there to make it worth such a high price?

ksmattfish · Nov 14, 2004

Unimaxium said:
Actually this leads me to a question... when it comes to 35mm SLRs, what more do you get between say a brand-new $2300 Nikon F6 and my 20-year-old K1000?

I'd say it depends on what kind of photography you are doing. It's easy to imagine the Nikon F6 beating out the K-1000 for sports photography. For the kind of photography I do (portraits, landscapes...), I'd take a K-1000 (and $2200) over a Nikon F6 anyday.

It's just like cars and everything else. A Honda Civic gets you to the grocery store and back just as well as a Hummer, but there are still folks who want to drive the Hummer.

I haven't seen a F6 in person, but what always surprised me about the F5 was the size. I'm willing to carry a camera around that is that big, but it better be giving me a larger neg than 35mm. The F5 is at least as big as as a medium format Fuji rangefinder.

Unimaxium · Nov 14, 2004

That's one of the things that surprised me, too, about the F6 is the size. I wonder what mechanisms could be packed in there to make it so much larger than your typical 35mm SLR. I could understand a large digital camera being large, since there is almost always more circuitry you can add to do more and more advanced things with capturing/storing/editing the image. But when it's a 35mm camera, you're just recording to the same kind of film no matter what quality camera you have. It's quite baffling to me personally.

ferny · Nov 15, 2004

I'd imagine it's bigger to allow for the electronics (there's more of them), allow space for air (to cool the electronics) and everything in there should be over-engineered to (so nothing breaks) which means it needs more room inside.
Besides it being more advanced, you've got the bonus of it never having film gone through it to. So nothing should be worn or loose.

ksmattfish · Nov 15, 2004

Unimaxium said:
I wonder what mechanisms could be packed in there to make it so much larger than your typical 35mm SLR. I could understand a large digital camera being large, since there is almost always more circuitry you can add to do more and more advanced things with capturing/storing/editing the image. But when it's a 35mm camera, you're just recording to the same kind of film no matter what quality camera you have. It's quite baffling to me personally.

Even though it's a film camera, it has a lot of computer in it. And also it needs a motor to get those super fast frame rates. It's a whiz-bang camera, and whiz-bang takes space.

The K-1000 is about as simple as it gets for an SLR design. That's why I like it.

rdodson · Nov 15, 2004

Unimaxium said:
Actually this leads me to a question... when it comes to 35mm SLRs, what more do you get between say a brand-new $2300 Nikon F6 and my 20-year-old K1000? I mean, with some cameras you can have automatic shutter speed and aperture adjustment and metering and focusing and such, while others are totally manual like mine. But what else do you get? What's there to make it worth such a high price?

I started out with a Minolta XG-1, very much like your k1000 I imaging.

The biggest differences to me were the auto focus and the motor drive. The speed was what I needed for birds in flight. I get more winners now, but the winners from my new gear don't look any better than the winners from my old gear.