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A retired tech in Phoenix told me to stop chasing shutter speeds with my tester, and he was right
I was talking with a retired repair tech in Phoenix last month about a jammed Pentax K1000, and he mentioned he never trusted his shutter tester below 1/500. I always chased exact numbers on mine, adjusting curtain tension until 1/1000 read clean, sometimes spending two hours on a single body. He said he just ran three test shots at each speed and looked for consistency, not perfection, because real film never cared about a 5 percent error anyway. I tried his way on four bodies this week, and every single one passed with a casual check in under 20 minutes. Turns out I was fixing numbers on a screen, not cameras. Has anyone else had a tester push them toward over-adjusting, or is it just me?
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caleb_ross1220d ago
Did that old tech ever tell you about the time he wasted a whole afternoon on a Canonet because his tester said the speeds were off? My dad had a similar deal with guitars, he would sit there turning truss rod nuts for hours chasing a perfect string height when the thing played just fine. Same energy as what you're describing, we get obsessed with the numbers and forget the tool is supposed to be used. Bet that K1000 runs smoother now than it ever did when you were dialing in curtain tension by the decimal.
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