Pentax SFXn sample pictures

When we recently when on holiday to Gloucestershire, I took some film cameras with me as well as my Pentax K-5, and these are some of the pictures I took with one of those cameras – a Pentax SFXn 35 mm SLR.

Because I was using the K-5 as my main camera for the trip, it made sense to make sure the film cameras I took were also K mount cameras so the lenses could be shared.

For that reason I took the Pentax SFXn loaded with Fuji Superia 400 and a Pentax MZ-M loaded with Kentmere 400 B&W film (as it happens, I picked up a new Minolta Dynax 505 Si Super just before we went, so I sneaked that into the luggage as well).

Although I’ve owned the SFXn for a couple of years, I’d not shot any film in it other than an initial test roll which turned out poorly.

I mainly used it in Aperture priority mode and had the 28 – 80 mm zoom fitted most of the time, although a couple of the shots below were taken using my Tamron 10-24 mm super wide angle. I was interested to see that when the Tamron was fitted, once the focal length was above about 14 mm the image circle was larger than the full frame SFXn and looked OK. The macro shots were taken with a Tamron 90 mm f2.8 macro lens.

All the shots relied on the internal metering of the SFXn and were autofocused. I had them developed by Photo Express in Hull and had the scans saved as Tiff files rather than Jpeg to see if there was any improvement in the quality of the files. All the images were imported into Lightroom and had a very small amount of exposure and clarity adjustment before they were exported as jpegs.

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Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the images from the Pentax SFXn. The metering seems to be spot on in just about all circumstances, and the subjects I took have all come out well and look pretty good on film.