I recently purchased an adapter that allows Pentax K mount lenses to be used on Canon EOS cameras from a German eBay seller called Mr. Rolfo. Here is a short, er long report.
Someone on the list pointed out an auction for a EOS-K mount adapter, and in fact I had been looking for one of these for a while. <http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7535484070> I nabbed it and waited for it to arrive. As you may know, I use a couple of Pentax lenses on my Canon kit, mainly because they are too good not to. I designed my own adapters and had them fabricated - the whole story is here: <http://www.cottysnaps.com/snaps/mods/details.html> When I came across Mr. Rolfo's adapter, I was very curious as to how he'd solved the problem, and the only way to see for myself was to get hold of one. 65 Euros later, one arrived in a small jiffy-bag. The adapter is quite nifty, and is based on an M42/EF adapter that can be had from most photo shops, and eBay: <http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7537522212> As you can see, the M42/EF is a simple adapter that allows a screwmount lens to be inserted into the middle of the adapter, and then the whole thing mates with a Canon bayonet camera. Mr Rolfo's EOS-K mount adapter has been machined directly from one of these screwmount adapters, and the machinist has done a reasonable job. Because the K mount flanges and the EF mount flanges are only 'out if sync' by a few millimetres, there is some interesting metalwork, and in places it looks quite thin. But once mounted, it does the job and holds the lens in place well, complete with a grub screw to prevent the adapter un-mounting itself. So the idea is that once on the lens, you leave it there, and it become part of the lens. If you had 2 or 3 lenses, you'd need 2 or 3 adapters. It is possible to change the adapter from one lens to another, but becomes moot with a further mod to the lens that is required - more on this in a moment. In fact, when I first mounted the adapter onto the lens (a test-bed K50mm f/1.2) and attached to a camera, it was out of whack by half a turn - so that the aperture and focus registration marks on the lens barrel were underneath somewhere and not on top as expected. I thought Mr Rolfo had sent me a dud, and to be fair he replied to my enquiring email very quickly, offering a full refund if the unit was bad. He sent some mounting guide pics and a PDF. His english is not the best, but I used Babel Fish to translate his German and that worked very well. In fact, it was me who was the dud. I had placed a K mount on the K50 1.2 but could only lay my fingers on 3 screws (too butt-lazy to go get some more screws in the next room!) and lo and behold, even though I thought I had lined up the K mount onto the lens correctly, it was out of kilter by quite an amount. Once the K mount was re-attached at the correct orientation, of course Mr. Rolfo's superb German engineering fitted like a glove. They don't say Vorsprung Dirch Technik (or whatever it is) for nothing. Naturally I apologised to Mr Rolfo forthwith and took back all the nasty things I said about his lathe. To anyone who hasn't got a clue about using an adapter like this, it means savaging the Pentax lens - this is Peter Alling's favourite part. The aperture lever (the short metal post that sticks out of the back of any K mount lens) has to be completely removed, or shortened so it doesn't protrude from the back of the lens, as there's nowhere for it to reside inside an EOS body, and nothing for it to do even if there was room. So once a lens has been modified like this, it will either work on a Canon camera with Mr. Rolfo's adapter, or on a Pentax camera without. Both cameras will only be able to use stop-down metering with the lens, in manual or aperture-priority. Open-aperture metering is lost. I haven't posted the detailed pics of the mount that Mr Rolfo sent me, as they are his copyright, but if anyone wants to see them, I have 3 jpegs of about 85kb each that I can send you. Email me off list. That concludes this presentation and if you've read this far then you're a worse schluck than I thought you were! I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming..... Cheers, Cotty ___/\__ || (O) | People, Places, Pastiche ||=====| http://www.cottysnaps.com _____________________________
