Honeywell Heiland Pentax H2

I was given a Honeywell Heiland Pentax H2 with a piece of a lens sticking out the front. I will deal with the lens stub in a following blog, but for now let’s examine this fine camera.

It was the first Pentax camera to have all it’s shutter speeds on one dial, a dial that can rotate in either direction. Note: Earlier cameras had the slow speeds on a separate dial on the front.

It was also the first focal plane shutter camera that had a “T” as well as a “B” on its shutter dial. The difference lies in the T position—when the shutter is fired—keeps the shutter open until the shutter dial is rotated off the T setting. If you use the B setting you have to hold the shutter fired with a cable release or a finger down on the shutter button. As soon as you release the pressure the shutter will close.

It has a small red dot that appears when the shutter is cocked and turns black when the shutter isn’t cocked. This feature was carried forward through many other Pentax cameras.

You may wonder about the involved name—Honeywell Heiland Pentax. Heiland was the photographic division of Honeywell—an American manufacturer of electronic controls for furnaces and the like. Heiland made the Strobonar series of electronic flash. For a time Japanese cameras came in through existing American distributors. For example Canon cameras came in through Bell&Howell.

One surprising thing about the camera was mentioned as the first of four cautions on the front of the instruction manual. The camera has an instant-return mirror, but the caution asks you to recock the camera’s shutter before trusting your focus will be accurate!

Which brings us to the last surprising thing about this camera. Although the focussing can be done at full aperture—and the lens will close down when the shutter release is pressed—you have to manually re-open the lens aperture after the camera is fired. This lens stub has a cocking lever.

This led to my big mistake with the camera. I assumed the flapper at the bottom off the mirror cage would trigger a standard stop-down pin on universal thread lenses.

I had picked up a Bushnell 90-230 f/4.5 to plug the gaping hole the lens stub created. It has the aforementioned stop-down pin. The poor little flapper was only meant to trigger an “Auto-Takumar” to close down. Trying to punch the stop-down pin on the later screw mount off-brand lens—it says “Bushnell” but it was made in Japan by someone—stalled the instant return process on every second or third shot. Of course once trained to be bad (or bent) in its instant return levers the shutter is still intermittent. There are stories on the web about how simple it is to place a drop of oil to get everything working seamlessly, but I looked under the base-plate at the stunningly simple layout and I didn’t want to screw things up with oil worse than they already are.

My only chance is to find one of the lenses actually made for this camera by Pentax.

For more on that try to catch the next blog on Auto-Takumar lenses.