My main digital camera is a Pentax K-01. I really like this camera and one of the main reasons I bought it was because it is compatible with my older Pentax lenses. However even though I’ve had the camera for a couple of years now, I hadn’t bothered to actually figure out using the older manual lenses with it. Last week I finally sat down and toyed around with it.

Using the manual lens is actually pretty easy. Old K-mount lenses will fit without any adapter and there is one setting on the camera you may need to adjust—under the Custom settings tab on the last page, 16.Using Aperture Ring needs to be enabled. In my case, without having that option enable, releasing the shutter button didn’t do anything with the older lens from my K-1000 attached.

Although I was able to get a couple of nice shots, working with the older lenses wasn’t too much fun. Manually focusing with the digital lens on the camera is tricky enough because unfortunately this model does not have an actual viewfinder. You can only see what you are looking at through the LCD on the back of the camera. I found when using the manual lens the lcd display became polarized when it was in or near focus so it was even harder to tell what the picture was actually going to look like. I thought about getting some kind of view finder adapter but I really don’t like any of the ones I’ve seen. So I’ll probably stick with using the digital lenses since I don’t really have any super specialized lenses anyway. My manual lenses can provide a bit shallower depth of field but there’s not that much difference to make it worth dealing with the annoying process of getting a properly focused subject.

Thinking about how much I hate composing images without a true viewfinder, I’m thinking of selling that camera and getting a DSLR. I’ve always liked my old SLRs and wanted to get a digital one but the mirror-less Pentax seemed like a better idea at the time. My only problem now is I’m not sure what DSLR I would like that’s in my price range, so I’ll probably start researching that soon. Look forward to an intense DSLR research post in the future!