It was a couple of months ago I acquired a Pentax Super Program 35 mm camera, and I've just developed my first film from it, so I thought I'd publish a follow-up post describing how I found the camera to shoot with and to feature the Pentax Super Program sample pictures.
Pentax Super Program Sample Pictures
First, a few details about the photos.
The camera was loaded with a roll of Kodak ColourPlus 200 film which I exposed at box speed with the camera used mostly in either program mode or aperture priority. The film was developed using the digibase C-41 pre-diluted kit and the negatives scanned with an Epson V550 perfection photo scanner. The resulting scans were imported into Lightroom, where I used my normal workflow for film.
The first few pictures were taken with a Tamron 10-24 mm Super Wide angle lens, which I use on my Pentax K5 DSLR. It's designed for use on an APS-C sensor, but I was interested to see how it would perform on a full frame SLR. In the viewfinder the lens vignetted below about 15 mm, but from 15 to 24 mm it seemed OK, and the pictures above seem to confirm this. Although there is a small amount of vignetting, it's not too bad.
The next few pictures were taken with a standard 50 mm f/1.7 A series lens from my P30, and interestingly seem to have better contrast and definition than the Tamron. On my K5, I find the Tamron one of my best lenses, so I was surprised it didn't perform so well on film.
There are 5 pictures (starting with the picture of my Daughter) which were taken with the Super Program in Program mode with a Pentax AF200S flash gun fitted to the camera and set to auto mode. I wanted to see how the flash and camera performed in auto mode, and it seems to have measured the exposure quite nicely and achieved some decent results.
Pentax Super Program Impressions
Now, my impressions of using the camera.
I found the Super Program a nice small camera to take about and use and found most of the controls easy to get to and select with one exception. The one exception was the mode dial and specifically the small lock button which stops it being accidentally moved. I found this really fiddly to press and release to turn the camera on.
Other than that issue, the camera seemed to perform well, and I'm quite pleased with the quality of the resultant scans.
