Oops – new comment on an old article. Anyway, good to get some of that off my chest.

Long-time Pentax 35mm owner here too. Never tried a 67 but I did buy an Auto 110 and 24mm (standard) lens in a charity shop a few weeks ago because, like Huss, I’d always been curious about what it could do.

Sadly, the short answer is ‘not much’. A slightly longer one is ‘as much as the film will allow’ – which is not much. I’ve given it one roll of long-expired (1984!) Kodacolor II and one of modern Lomography Tiger 200, and the results from both could most charitably be described as ‘fun’. It exposes well enough on 200 film, which the tab on the cartridge causes it to expose at 100, but the lack of a pressure plate inside the 110 cartridge means that the film goes where it likes and nothing comes up truly sharp. Meanwhile, magnifying such a tiny negative means there’s huge grain everywhere, on everything. I have a picture of the route plan inside a Warsaw tram car, and only the huge title text and the route number are close to readable – whereas in a shot of the same plan taken from further away with my Fuji X70, I can comfortably read all the stop names.

Now you might argue that image quality doesn’t really matter here, and that comparing an ancient novelty film camera to a modern digital one is unfair; I’d agree with the latter. But the Auto 110 wasn’t cheap 40 years ago; it was conceived and marketed as a high-end plaything, which means it has to work as a camera. And it simply doesn’t; it lets you go through the motions of using a ‘proper’ camera – and it is quite nice to focus, click and wind on with a proper lever – but it then produces images that are scarcely worth looking at.

I’m not unhappy with my Auto 110. I paid £20 for it, to a shop that’ll put the money towards clean water and school books for children in Africa and similarly good uses. But when a cartridge of Tiger 200 costs £7, and to develop, print and scan it costs another £18, each picture costs me a pound and I want more than cuteness and curiosity value for that.

Honestly we talked in-house about the 67 quite a bit while putting this together. And yes I’ll get to work on writeups for both.

Another fun read!

I handled my first K1 at a local shop a week or so ago when I was picking up some film. What a great body with a ton of feature sets built in. These days I have been looking to reduce the bulk in my kit which pulls it off the list unfortunately. I have high hopes for the KP possibly pulling me back into the Pentax world though. I need to find one to mess around with.

I use a few different Taks on my MX. I also have a few Chinon M42s that render fantastic images.