This Camera (the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic) was my first SLR and my first real camera. I bought it back in 1971 with the earnings from a summer job after my first year of college and got lots of good use out of it. I sprung for the 50mm f/1.4 lens, and later bought 3 other lenses. There was a 135mm that I almost never used, a 50mm f/4 macro that I ended up using more than the f/1.4, and a wonderful 28mm lens (though I sometimes wished for a 24mm). I ended up selling this camera in 1980 or so to raise some money, and have often regretted it.
My camera was the M42 screw mount model, and I took a lot of needling from a friend with a bayonet mount SRT-101 Minolta. The truth was they were both fine cameras and we both took a lot of great pictures.
Mine was an actual Asahi, not a Honeywell Pentax. I bought it from some discount outfit in Hong Kong, and had to fill out papers for US Customs certifying that I would deface the Asahi trademark upon receiving the camera since Honeywell had some exclusive "deal" to sell the camera in the USA. I put some token scratch on the Asahi logo and my conscience was clean.
Uncle Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org