The best thing about the Pentax K1000 is that you can still use modern lenses like the 31mm, 43mm, and 77mm limited lenses. And the DSLRs are backwards compatible too.

The best in my collection!! Still use it today, I run about 5-7 rolls of film through it a year. Received mine as a gift from my grandmother waayyyy back in 2000!!

Always wanted one of these for the collection but simply could not justify the prices they were going for. Then one day I opened eBay and one popped up for $50. Cam looked great in the pics so I took a chance. When I received it the cam was in absolutely amazing shape, super clean, almost no dust in the viewfinder and all shutter speeds sound to be good, the meter is even responsive though I doubt I'll trust it lol. Moral of the story...patience can be a virtue, if you're patient enough. Cheers.

I have a few classic film cameras. K1000 is the simplest, and by far the one I grab the most. And you're so right about the pentax lenses. They're fantastic.

I still have mine and it's still in great shape. It just kept working in both tropical as well as arctic temperatures.

The K1000 did everything right. Rugged, reliable, simple, good looking and those wonderful Pentax SMC lenses. I still have my K1000 that I bought in 1977 and it still works fine. That's 46 years of reliability. The simple, averaging metering taught you how to judge the exposure of a scene and the subject in that scene.

It's what I learned on, that's why I will always use center focus. Much quicker than a joystick isn't it.

This was the first film camera I got while studying photography at college and god I miss it so much. I took it everywhere and have some many beautiful and nostalgic photos from that time in my life, and they all stopped it got stolen on a trip abroad. Couldn't afford to replace it back then, but your video might have inspired me to get a new one. Great vid, love the history, hearing your experience and seeing your photos! My main hesitation for picking up film again is how expensive film development is now, and how hard labs are to find! Would be great to see a video on your process and experience with film development; things to look out for/be wary of, do you post your film to a lab (any recommendations?), do you recommend just getting negatives and scanning at home? If so, any suggestions for a good negative scanner? It's a bit of a rabbit hole I'm eager to find the bottom of so I can start again.

Question, what are you using to record the video? I love the film/grainy look and feel.

Pulled my dad’s old Pentax k1000 out of our closet and it works perfectly even though he hadn’t fired it in 22 years. Love that camera.

It was renowned at the time of its release and even won camera of the year I believe

I learnt on a praktica super tl 1000 wich is really similar and the simpleness was my favorite part

What are your settings for outdoors

woah sweet vid man! now I have to ask tho, which camera did you use to film this whole video itself? lol. Sorry its just that I can't get over how clear & crisp your video footage quality is. I suppose that means ur using a camera that's well...expensive & for advanced photographers 😅 If I ever decided to make videos similar to urs, like vlogging or cool video essays. May I ask what cameras you'd recommend that best replicate the video quality you have? and also perhaps fit my tight budget of $500-600? thanks!

Do you recommend this camera?

The k1000 was my first real film camera. Probably had mine about 7 years, the thing is a tank.

I’ve been using the k1000 as my first film camera for about 6 months now, and to be honest it’s fantastic. Great build quality, simple manual controls that really encourage you to engage with the camera. I found it too easy on a DSLR to rely on automatic modes. Great video, would love to see a follow up on what cameras I might graduate to from the k1000, depending on what I’d be looking for in a more advanced camera!

I discovered your channel just now. A month ago because I bought my very first MFT camera and I thought I would want to practice with the 50mm focal length, but since I'm just a student, I searched for vintage lenses. I got a 50mm f1.2 Asahi Pentax from the Facebook marketplace for just 40 CAD. I didn't know I had to buy an adapter, and moreover, I did not know that the focal length is doubled in MFTs, making the lens effectively 100mm 😆. Now it's sleeping inside my box with silica gels

i have the Asahi Pentax SPII for BW and The (ESII from my Father) for color. and they work perfect.

Wild photos!

I have a k1000 belong to my father. I think he got it for Christmas a long time ago. I was often in front of the k1000's lens growing up.

I have it's big brother the super program. Excellent camera.

Used mine for the first time the other week, I lost the battery cover so had no light meter! Relied on the sunny 16 method and hopefully it looks good when developed

bro deserves atleast a mil fr😕

incredible photos!!💔

Great review! Wonderful camera, you could give the camera to a total non photographer, show them how to focus and change aperture to get the needle 'in the middle' & 90% of the time they would take usable photos! Apart from focus only three things to set iso, aperture, shutter speed. These days I take photos with an iphone and when I do use a dslr often it is set to full green auto mode😂 Even Ken Rockwell says cameras got too damned complicated!

I have found the m.zuko lenses are among the sharpest ones I have.

I always find these mystifications on the internet about the K1000 very funny. The camera was successful because it was cheap and from the end of the 70s onwards it was also cheaply produced in Hong Kong and later in China. In the later years the base and the upper part were made of plastic. The exposure metering was integral, not even centre-weighted, which was very primitive and in many situations often led to underexposure if you didn't correct it, which takes experience and practice. The camera does not have a button to close the aperture to control the depth of field, which is a big minus point, especially in creative photography.

It does have exposure compensation you just alter the film speed.

Pentax would do well to include this one in their reissue plans.

Bought mine in 1981, still got it. Dont trust the meter tho.

fab camera - unless you're an idiot you can't take a bad image - I prefer the MX - awesome glass available for both

All-manual cameras were common in the 1960s and 70s, so nothing special about the K1000 there. It was popular because it undercut the prices of the equivalent bottom-of-the-range cameras of the other quality brands, and art schools recommended it to their students (because of that). It was really an old Spotmatic design stripped of features and given a K mount. Pentax themselves made better all-manual cameras at the time, but they cost more : the KX and MX.

1:50 Christ, could you have thrown any less light into these scene? Film chamber is black and black!