It’s 2023! I decided to take this camera out on the new year eve to see how is it like shooting a 16 years old camera in the first day of 2023.
No one probably asked for this.. why bother to put a Pentax lens on a four-third sensor? The answer is, because I CAN. It was a challenge I set to design an adapter that fits just nice considering the flange distance and to adjust the aperture. Also, it looks quite vintage and cute.
This custom-designed adapter allows adjustment on the aperture even for the DA lenses that do not have an aperture ring. All the photos below were taken with the Pentax DA 21mm 3.5 limited.
This camera cost $1’999 when first released, got it cheap from eBay many years back. It is a fun camera but painful to focus and for night shots. The low-light image quality stands no chance against modern smartphone cameras.
It is funny, that with modern sensor and lens, low-light doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. Phone using multiple lenses with algorithm to capture extra information to interpolate a high quality photograph had greatly compensated the lack of sensor size, yet produce way better image quality than the Panasonic L1.
The L1 suffers high noise, low ISO (max at 1600). 1600 is hardly usable, 800 is still manageable. To use manual focus lens, there is a 2-button-sequence to focus zoom assist. However due to the poor low light performance, it is hardly visible on the LCD. In the end, I have to use old-school estimate the distance for focusing.
Conclusion
I must admit, in the earlier years I like the feel of this camera alot. Probably because of the influence from Leica, it has a certain film-camera handling (not the image quality though) and style that I really like. The closest I could think of would be the GX9.
The Panasonic L1 is definitely not my workhorse. Will I use this camera again? Maybe, but it will most likely be sitting in my dry box for a longer years like a museum piece before I decided to use it again.
Afterthought
I do wish camera companies attempt to make something like a rangefinder-cross-SLR camera again. There is something I find missing in the industry: The mirror less trend had reduced flange distance so much, and the modern lens design does not necessarily become smaller. If we attempt to mount a old SLR lens onto the mirrorless, we often find ourselves with a three centimeter long adapter that looks way off.
A possible solution could be a camera with an auto adjustable sensor position: that is compact even when mounted with an old manual film lenses, and able to adapt to modern lenses at the same time.
#leica #panasonic #camera #vintagecamera #pentax #diy #diyphotography #newyear #countdown #2023 #throwback #leicadigilux3
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Witono's Freestyle 