I like the feeling of old quality things. You all know that uncle or friend or grandfather still driving that 20 or 30 years old car and you always admired that all-metal feeling when you touched it. No plastics, no warranty, no mechanics hooking it up on computer. No matter it stinks a bit, it needs its care and your friend probably spends his every weekend trying to fix it, old high quality things brings us old memories and standards that just you granny remembers;)

In case of Asahi Pentax 50 we are talking not just about high end quality but about the cheapest lense for pentax ever. Like… ever.
For just arround 50 bucks you can have an amazing 50mm manual focusing lense with so huge bokeh it will make it hard to make all-sharp face picture.

All you need to get ready is to take several images for every picture. From my experience the view finder shows slightly different sharpens and focus point than the display and than the reality. Forget about beep tone when focused and about green square showing you focused area. It just doesn`t work.
And be prepared for helpfull turists offering you to make you a picture of you. No matter how many times you tell them its manual focus, they still gonna take one picture after another and complain about how tha camera is broken. But that’s the funny part. In case of this lense you gonna get your bang for your buck!

Back in the times when The Asahi Optical Company, later marketed as Pentax, popularised M42 lens mount (usually known as a pentax screw mount) managed to make the highest quality glass available. And that’s exactly the feeling you have when touching the lens. You almost got a feeling that the lense is the same weight as the camera body and that’s the feeling I like. Touchning the solid metal-glass lens.

Comparing to this, when touching it’s much jounger automatic brother (Pentax automatic fifty), you feel a bit of disapppointment like you spent four times more money on some cheap plastic rubbish. For understanding quality and pros and cons of automatic 50, you must take the picture itself. But about auto 50 some other time.
See for yourself, enjoy