I finally caught why so many people mess up infinity focus on old SLRs

I was working on a Pentax Spotmatic last Tuesday for a guy who said his shots were always soft at distance. First thing I checked was the mirror stop, it was fine. Then I looked at the focusing screen and sure enough someone had installed it backwards. I see this all the time with folks who try to clean or swap screens without marking the orientation. It throws off the depth of field preview and makes infinity focus impossible to nail. I know because I did it myself on a Minolta SRT about 5 years ago and wasted two rolls of film before figuring it out. Has anyone else run into this or found a trick to stop people from putting them in wrong?

3 comments

3 Comments

fiona_kim971d ago

Oh man, backwards focusing screen nightmare. I did the exact same thing on a Nikon FM2 a few years back, spent a whole weekend shooting landscapes that came back totally fuzzy. Now I always snap a test shot of a distant rooftop after any screen work just to be sure.

kai_chen21d ago

Nah, soft distance shots are almost always just a bad lens.

thea6021d ago

@kai_chen2 I wish, then it’d just be a cheap lens swap instead of my own dumb screwup.