On Tue, 4 Jan 2005 23:00:57 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks for the info. > > I says it's an SP not an SP2, though oddly this one DOES have 1000 > marked on the speed capacity and a self timer? It pretty odd actually > because I have all the user guides for these and mine looks more like > an SP2 but says it's an SP...
I probably didn't explain myself very well. Short story: If it says SP, then you have a Spotmatic SP, which is more or less the original Spotmatic. Except it's not that simple, as the earliest model's film speed indicator only goes up to 800. Around a year or two after the original, they came out with a new and improved version that had an indicator that went up to 1600. There were also some internal improvements to the shutter. The model designation stayed the same. All SP's had a timer. Longer story: An SP will also say "Spotmatic" on the front. All Spotmatics have a fastest shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second, so it makes sense that yours does. A couple of years after the Spotmatic came outt (I haven't checked, but I think around 1969 or so) they came out with the "bargain" version of the Spotmatic. Some will say that it isn't actually a Spotmatic, as it doesn't say Spotmatic on the front. They called it the SP500, as the design called for a fastest shutter speed of 1/500th of a second. I guess they thought that taking the self-timer off it wasn't "cheapening" it enough. Problem is, the engineering department found that it would cost way too much to design a new shutter mechanism that only went to 1/500th, so they put exactly the same shutter as the "real" Spotmatic in there, didn't put the 1000 speed on the dial. But, if you click beyond 1/500th, there is a detente, and the shutter will fire. Apparently they didn't calibrate that speed in the factory, and most of them actually fire at about 1/700th or so. I have an SP500 and use the phantom 1/1000th all the time, with no exposure problems whatsoever. Two years later, they decided to drop the sham, and came out with the SP1000, the same camera as the SP500, but with the 1/1000th speed painted on the dial. Am I making sense? <g> Now, you say your camera looks just like an SP II. The main difference between the SP and the SP II is that the latter has a hotshoe flash holder. So, you don't have to connect the flash to the camera with a PC wire, like in the old days. The SP had a removable cold shoe, meaning that you did have to connect the flash to camera by wire. So, if you have a removable cold shoe, SP. Or no flash shoe at all, SP. Hotshoe, SP II. Does that help? You have a camera of great historical significance, as the Spotmatic was the first commercially successful through the lens metering 35mm SLR on the market (Topcan beat Pentax to market by a couple of months with a ttl SLR, but it was a flop, so we don't count that <g>). You should know a bit about the history of the marque, anyway <vbg>. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
