Oh my God, look what I just bought!

[milosh]

Hey everyone!

I still can't believe what I bought today. I walked into one second-hand shop and I saw a big camera hanging on it's neckstrap. I took it and saw it's an old Pentax SLR with some big lens. I bought it for 5 Euros, that's aroud 7$! Can you believe that!

It's a Pentax Program A, 35 mm film SLR, and it has a Takumar-a zoom lens, 1:3.5-4.5 28-80 mm.

Oh my God, I'm still so excited. I wanted to jump when I walked out of that store.
I don't know, maybe this wouldn't be such a big thing for some of you, but it is for me. It's my first SLR and my first film camera.
I found a roll of film and bought two little baterries and it seems to work like it should.
Btw, the camera seems to be in very good condition, no dents or scratches.
I found a manual for it, so now I'm reading it. I'm sure I'll have many questions about for you guys in the future.
I'll post some pictures of it another day, don't have much time right now.

[windrider86]

Congratulations on your find!

[fstopMike]

My first camera was a Pentax SLR that I bought in 1970. I hope you have a good time with your new find!

[m.c.adams]

Good camera, great price. I hit the garage sales and flea markets all the time looking for old equipment. As of right now, I own about 25 cameras, everything from Brownies to Speed Graphics. I have 2 film slr's, a Nikon FA and a Olympus OM10 that I still use from time to time. Have fun with your new toy.
Mark

[deltacsar665]

congrats, i first started on film too and its loads of fun to work with

[Laurence]

Enjoy your new purchase.

[milosh]

Thanks everyone!

I'm playing with it all the time, can't get mu hands off it. I just love how the zooming and focusing on the lens works. I found that this is some low-end lens, not very good quality I guess. But, we'll see how the images will come out. I have to check today whether my local photo shop can scan films and transfer them to digital. That would be awesome.

A question, do you ever scan films? Do you loose much quality by scaning?

[m.c.adams]

I think that most good film developing outlets will also scan the negatives and make a CD for you. That is how I have mine done. Good luck and have fun, remember, its not the price of the equipment, but the eye behind the lense.
Mark

This is a photo that was scanned at processing, originally shot on film, Olympus OM10

[Swisstony10]

Before I switched to digital, I used a fairly old Canon negative scanner (it wasn't even USB - I had to install a SCSI card on my compy to run it) - it scans my negatives and at full res it chucks out images at around 15 megapixels. There's definitely no loss of quality, and I still have lots of Photoshop flexibility. Admittedly, it's not quite as good as having shots in RAW format, and I still had to pay to get the film processed, but yeah - negative scanning was good for me.

Russ.