$50 Film Camera Challenge: Sears KS Super II

This post (and to a great extent, the blog itself) was inspired two things: Brian Auer's $50 Film Camera challenge, and Ken Rockwell's excellent article Free Digital Camera.

Ken's article asserts that the cheapest path to all the advantages of a digital SLR is to get a cheap film SLR and just pay a few bucks to have the film processed and scanned. You can develop a lot of film before you'd have spent the $700 or so that an entry-level DSLR costs. I decided to try for myself and see if I agreed with him.

So, with nods to Ken, my under-$50 film camera for Brian's challenge is the Sears KS Super II. I didn't need to buy it; I have owned it since around 1986 but it had been sitting on the shelf unused for the past 10 years. You can pick one up on eBay for around $25, so it definitely qualifies. This was my first (so far only) 35mm film camera, after graduating from my childhood Kodak Instamatic.

This camera, as with many other Sears models, was actually made by Ricoh, and takes standard Pentax K-mount lenses. I haven't used a lot of different SLRs, but I can tell you that this one seems to be of rock-solid construction, and all the controls operate smoothly and well.

Here's the camera and my two lenses, a 50mm prime and an 80-200mm zoom, taken in my high tech (NOT!) home studio.


Click any picture in this article to see it bigger at flickr

My framework for this review is this one question:
If you have a decent mid- or high-end digital point-and-shoot, would you want to switch to shooting with an old film SLR?

For the comparisons below, my digital camera is a Canon S2 IS. It's a really great point-and-shoot, it has full manual controls available, and it's got a 12x zoom. It cost $500 when I bought it three years ago (the current model, the S5, is only about $350). Back then you couldn't get a DSLR for under $1100, so the S2 seemed like a bargain by comparison.

So, what can the Sears 35mm film camera do that my digital Canon cannot?

1. Different lenses: I currently own just the two lenses pictured above. However, if I wanted to add a longer or wider prime lens, a bigger zoom, a fisheye, macro extension tubes, all those options are available to me.
2. Faster lenses: my Canon S2 is F/2.7 wide open, and at maximum zoom it's F/3.5. By comparison, the 50mm prime lens that came with my film camera goes to F/2.0, and if I wanted to get an even faster lens, I could. Shooting things like the kids' band concerts, I would love to have a 1.8 or 1.4 prime lens.
   
3. Filters: the ability to attach filters is something that I really wish my Canon S2 had straight out of the box (I can buy an adapter, but that's an additional expense).
   
4. Manual Focus: I almost hadn't realized how much I miss this until I got an SLR in my hands again. My Canon has a manual focus mode, using up-and-down arrow keys on the back of the camera. It's not useful for much of anything except locking the focus at infinity when you want to prevent the camera from auto-focusing on something closer. The Sears camera, like any SLR, has a wonderful manual focus ring, and that prism-screen thingee in the viewfinder that helps you see if you're in focus.
   
5. Black and White film: of course, any digital photo can be converted to B/W in post-processing, but because I'm still distrustful of my own post-processing abilities, I seldom do that conversion. However, put a roll of B/W film in your camera, and Presto! you're gonna take 24 black and white photos. This is a great stretch to your abilities as a photographer; you now have no choice but to go out and find 24 shutter clicks that you think/hope will look good without the color.
6. High ISO: my Canon point-and-shoot has ISO settings of 50/100/200/400, but the 400 rarely gives usable results. However, pop some 800, 1600, or even 3200 speed film into the Sears camera, and you're good to go. I started a roll of 800 speed Kodak color film last Friday night while shooting the marching band field show at twilight; can't wait to see how the pictures turned out!
   
7. Hotshoe flash: probably the biggest thing that's missing from my digital Canon is a hotshoe. I don't actually own a flash attachment for the Sears camera yet, but you can bet it's on top of my shopping list. Time to get some use out of the hours that I've spent reading Strobist.
   
8. Run for years on one battery: my Sears film camera does have a small battery in it, to run the light meter. When I pulled the camera off the shelf after 10 or maybe 15 years of no use, it was ready to go and the light meter was working. That's close enough to "doesn't need batteries" in my book.

OK, time for fair-and-balanced reporting; what can the Sears KS Super II not do?

1. Shutter speed control: this is probably the biggest negative on the KS Super II--it's not fully manual. You give it the ISO and the F-stop, it chooses the shutter speed. Worse yet, it has no way to tell you what shutter speed it has chosen, just indicator lights (green for good, blinking green for maybe too slow, red for way too slow). According to the camera manual, the blinking green comes if the shutter speed will be slower than 1/50 of a second. But there's no way to know how much slower.
   
2. Long shutter times: the maximum shutter time for the KS Super II is one second. So, this is not your camera for night shots, fireworks, etc. The Canon S2, by contrast, will do up to 15 seconds straight out of the box, and with some help from CHDK, up to 65 seconds.
3. Auto Focus: OK, I know I said above that it's nice to be able to manually focus again; however, on this camera you have to focus every single shot. Let's face it, for those hanging out with the family, take a quick snapshot type photos, the autofocus on any recent digicam does quite nicely 95% of the time.
   
4. Chimping: I admit it, I do really miss checking the LCD screen to see whether I "nailed" a shot or not immediately.
5. Not quite free: contrary to Ken Rockwell's attention-grabbing headline, shooting and developing film is not quite free. And when even a casual hobbyist like me can come home from a day's outing having snapped 200 or 300 pictures on a digicam, film cameras require selectivity in what to shoot.

As far as actual costs for developing and processing, I'm paying about $3 per 24-exposure roll at Costco, for just develop and scan to CD. The scans are a nice large 3088x2048, and I've been mostly pleased with the quality. The shots I have posted for Brian's challenge (every picture from an entire roll) were resized to 1600X1061 before uploading to flickr, but have had little or no post-processing (some had minor spot edits, and a few got a bit of unsharp mask after being resized). I'm looking forward to doing a full post-process on some of them once the challenge is over.

My $50 Film Camera set at flickr has several pictures of the camera itself, plus the 26 images from a full roll of Kodak Black&White 400 CN. I'm not often a black-and-white shooter, so this was an artistic stretch for me.

Here are my favorites from the B&W roll:




See some color work from this camera at my "from film" flickr set.

So, is the Sears KS Super II the film camera for you? I think it's certainly a workable option, and there are usually a few available on eBay at very reasonable prices (also search for Ricoh to find similar and/or identical models without the Sears branding). It can be a nice intermediate step if you want to move away from an all-automatic point-and-shoot; it'll let you practice your choice of f-stop and manual focus while still helping you out by picking a reasonable shutter speed.

I'd love to hear your experiences with this camera or one like it. Post a comment here or at my flickr stream. I'm looking forward to being a part of the ongoing dialogue about how film cameras fit into the 21st century.

--sdc