Recently my wife and her coworkers spent the better part of a day cleaning out their offices. One one them came across an old Pentax ME Super complete with a Pentax 50/f2 lens. He was going to toss it out with the rest of the trash, but my wife rescued it and brought it home to me.

Other than the batteries were long dead, the back of the camera wouldn't close properly, and the shutter curtain didn't always fire when I pressed the shutter release, it was in fine shape!

Fresh batteries ($7) brought the meter back to life. I tinkered with the camera's back and now it closes w/o having to force it and the shutter curtain fires on demand. Not bad for a $7 investment.

It's one tiny camera (which is great because I can toss it in my briefcase and take it on business trips and such).

My questions are:

Are there any quirks about this camera I should know about?

What lenses (primes and zooms) would you recommend? Focal lengths I like to work with are 24mm - 200mm.

What flash would you recommend for the ME Super (something with a bounce/swivel head)?

I plan to use the camera as is for a while. I'm not going to rush out and buy a bunch of equipment to use with the ME Super anytime soon (it just might die again - who knows) - it's just for my information.

Thanks!

-- Jim Hicks (jhicks992@aol.com), February 12, 2000

Answers

Great little camera. I had one for about 10 years. It's only quirkiness is the two buttons that select shutter speed. After I got used to it I prefered this, but generaly used it on (aperture prefered auto mode most of the time. The ME Super was an improvement over the original ME that had some frequent electronic problems, and as I recall, no manual mode at all. The view screen was bigger and brighter than the Canon EOS stuff I've been using more recently. I really miss that.

Any K mount lens will work with it. It was designed for Pentax's K-M series lenses but the newer K-A and even K-AF will work as well. There are hundreds of used ones being sold every week on Ebay. I used a cheap Vivitar zoom that was real garbage, so I can't help with specifics.

As far a flashes go, just about any auto flash will work well with it, but dedicated units will set the shutter to 1/125 for you. I prefered a non dedicated unit so I could set a slower shutter speed to add some ambient light to the indoor pics. The Sunpak 383 would be a nice choice. It's about the same as the Vivitar 283 but adds a swivel head.

-- Jim Strutz (jimstrutz@juno.com), February 13, 2000.

Hi Jim (Hicks), check out this website: http://www.phred.org/pentax/k/

It's got info on lenses and flash units for your ME Super. Look under K-Mount Camera Bodies for info on ME Super.

-- Hoyin Lee (leehoyin@hutchcity.com), February 13, 2000.

Ditto Jim Hicks. Get used Pentax lenses. You can use them with any Pentax SLR K-mount, of which there are a lot to be had on the used market.

-- Jeff Polaski (polaski@acm.org), February 14, 2000.

I've had my me super for a few weeks now and I love it. I have several lenses, a pentax smc -m 50mm f/1.7 which is a great lense to start with, its good to have at least one pentax lense as tey will give you the best quality. I also have a cheap vivtar 80-200mm f/4.5 and my favourite, a zenitar 16mm fisheye which is very fun. pentax for life!

-- Bala Clark (balaclark83@aol.com), June 21, 2002.