Lens cross reference

Will the two lenses i have for my ZX-7 fit any other brand of camera? I want to switch to digital, but need to know if i'm stuck with buying the Pentax.

Thanks,
Steve

Hi Steve

Very unlikely, even if you can bodge up/buy an adapter (the physical lens mounts are all very different), you'll lose pretty much all of the information and features of the lens (and maybe even metering). Modern lenses provide the body with quite a bit of info, such as focal length (amount of 'zoom'), focus distance, aperture etc., which the camera body takes into consideration when focussing and (especially) metering. As digital SLRs are perhaps the most modern, they take advantage of all of this, hence if you use a lens the camera cannot communicate with (as will be the case using Pentax lenses on Canon, Nikon Sigma etc. SLRs) they will be handicapped. I'm not even sure if the camera will be able to operate the lens aperture, and I'm almost certain the autofocus won't work.

I would suggest that the price of digital SLR is such that you might want to invest in a decent lens anyway, and one that is specifically designed for that camera - I don't know what you have already, if they're the standard Mz/Z series zoom lenses, you might want to upgrade anyway.

So the short answer is even if you could, which I'm not sure, it wouldn't be very good.

As an aside, Pentax are allegedly bringing out a cheap DSLR, when it turns up is anyone's guess - it's what I'm holding out for anyway. I would suggest, though, that you make your decision about which marque you want to go with soon, before you invest a great deal of money.

Hope this helps

Cheers
Matt

There are several minor camera brands that use the Pentax bayonet (Chinon, Ricoh, some Vivitar, various store brands) but I am not yet aware of any that make digital SLRs.

Hang on a month or two for Pentax's new cheaper digital SLR. Or save up and buy the *ist D. You won't find a better camera in its price range.

I don't feel as though I'm stuck with Pentax, rather that it's a pretty positive thing to be able to use my existing lenses on any digital SLR at all. From most accounts the *istD is a splendid DSLR.

I'm sure that using Pentax lenses on any other marque of DSLR is not a feasible proposition, for the reasons already suggested.

Hi

Just following on from George's statement, I think that the minor brands use the Pentax bayonet as it's an open standard, with no restriction - I was under the impression that most of the others are copyrighted and patented to death, hence no third party uses them. I don't know if this holds for the newer Pentax Autofocus mount though, and as I'm not expecting a manual focus DSLR anytime soon I don't reckon we'll see anything digital from Ricoh et al!

Going along with some of the other comments, I've heard the *istD is indeed a good camera, it seems to do well in tests as well.

Cheers
Matt