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Pentax K1000 - Wikipedia
The best camera I ever owned. A fully manual slice of heaven. I had it from about 1979 until the summer of 1986 when it got stolen in Seattle when the apartment I was living in got broken into. I still have the flash for it and the Pentax ME I got as a replacement (a mistake - the K1000 was far superior), my last film camera.
Me too, only my K1000 didn’t get stolen, it got wiped out by a shot of seawater from the spout at Depot Bay, Oregon. I got a little too close, and it never really recovered. Replaced mine with an ME too, which I used, less and less over time, up until I got my K100D a couple years ago. Always had a thing for Pentax.
My favorite camera ever, which was taken from me in 1981 (maybe 82) when the store I was working at (Electronics Boutique, which later became Games and Gadgets which later became EB Games) was having a huge Dungeons and Dragon event and I was supposed to take pictures but two minutes after I put my camera down to help someone, it was gone forever. A nerd stole my beloved camera.
I had the K1000’s big brother, the Super ME. It was my Dad’s. I still have it, but the light meter’s dead, so it’s not much of a camera at this point…
I still have my first SLR, a Program Plus. My sister had a Minolta, and my parents were inspired to get my dad an SLR, a Pentax Super Program, which he promptly went on vacation without because he found its owners manual daunting. While they were on vacation, I learned how to use his camera, a fact I don’t think made him any more comfortable with it (IIRC, it was over a year before he took a single picture with it). But when I then wanted an SLR of my own, I guess keeping things in the camera family seemed like a good idea, because my birthday-and-Christmas present was a new Pentax Program Plus.
I moved to DC without it, asked my mom to ship it, and had her insist it wasn’t in their house. On my next trip home I found it exactly where I’d told her it would be and brought it back with me, only to be reminded that the focus screen had gotten knocked out of alignment — the reason I had stopped using it in the first place. I took it to a camera repair shop here, who installed a new focus screen, scratching it in the process (they then gave me the repair and a new back seal for free).
I took some great pictures with it, but the auto-metering was always hit or miss, since the design of the KA bayonet mount wasn’t as good as it should have been, and the camera had a tendency to lose electronic contact with the lens when you released the shutter (and the fail-safe was the maximum auto-exposure shutter time, something like 22 seconds). After that last “repair” I put it on a shelf where it’s remained.
