Sears KS Auto review

By Aaron Gold

“Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you, honey.”— Loggins & Messina, Danny’s Song

I’m a little reluctant to reveal my favourite bargain-basement classic-era film camera, lest people start snapping them up, raising the prices and diminishing the supply. I suppose that makes me a selfish narcissist, but at least I’ll be a selfish narcissist with a good supply of cheap, classic SLRs.

Still, I can’t help myself: whenever I read about some newbie film photographer who just spent $200 for a light-leaky Pentax K1000 with an off-brand 50mm f/2 lens, it gives me the red ass.

Nothing against the K1000, but I want to grab these folks by the neck-strap and shout: “You can do so much better!” (By the way, did you know that in the state of California, there is no limit on the number of strangers who can take out a restraining order against you?) So, in the spirit of the public welfare, I am ready to reveal to you, constant Kosmo Foto reader, my pick for the best bargain among manual-focus 35mm SLRs: the Sears KS Auto.

There will now be a short pause while you say: “Sears? Who the hell wants a camera from Sears?” 

Why I love me some Sears cameras

For those outside of North America and/or too young to have used a rotary telephone, Sears was the Amazon of its day, with brick-and-mortar stores and a mail-order catalogue that sold everything from pencils to entire houses in kit form. (Er, the houses were in kit form, not the pencils.)

Sears had a host of captive in-house brands made by other manufacturers – Kenmore appliances, Die Hard car batteries, Craftsman tools – and they sold Sears-branded cameras made by several companies including Asahi, Mamiya, and Olympus. Also, Ricoh, as in the same Ricoh that gave us the GR1 and now owns Pentax. I’ve been in love with Ricoh cameras ever since a friend gave me his old KR-10, a useful if chintzy-feeling K-mount SLR.

It seems Ricoh never tried to compete directly against biggies like Nikon and Pentax; their ads made it clear they were focused on value. The XR-2, their top-of-the-line SLR for 1977, boasted no cutting-edge technology like Pentax’s gallium arsenic phosphorus photo diode metering cells or Nikon’s air-damped mirror.

But it was (and still is) loaded with features found on high-end contemporaries like the Nikon FE and Pentax KX: match-needle meter, shutter speed and aperture display in the viewfinder, depth-of-field preview, and a mirror lock-up that activates with the self-timer. The XR-2 even has a dedicated multiple-exposure button and a built-in viewfinder blind*, just like Pentax’s top-of-the-K-line K2DMD.

(* If you’re shooting automatic on a tripod, using a cable release or the self-timer and not blocking the viewfinder with your face, light coming in through the eyepiece can throw off automatic exposure settings. I had no idea!)

Eagles Among the Meleagris

Ricoh SLRs aren’t the prettiest things; instead of the classic black-and-silver look, they are monochrome black (though, to be fair to Ricoh, all-black was an extra-cost option on many classic SLRs). They’re largely untrammelled by nostalgia or a stellar reputation, and a few of Ricoh’s cameras were – well, if not exactly turkeys, certainly in the genus Meleagris.

So the XR-2 sells cheap: to this day, you can easily find an XR-2 or XR-2s (“s” denotes provision for a motor drive) with a lens for well under US$50. Said lens will likely be one of Ricoh’s Rikenons, most of which, with the notable exception of the goosedown-soft 55mmf/2.2, will  hold their own against comparable Pentax glass. Not that they need to, since the XR-2 is 100% compatible with Pentax’s own K-mount lenses.

But here’s the Big Secret starting in 1979: the Ricoh XR-2S showed up in the Sears Catalogue as the Sears KS Auto. In today’s market, having even less brand-name recognition than Ricoh, the KS Auto sells even cheaper. How cheap? I own three, and they cost me (in order of purchase) US$16, $free and $33 – and that last one came with a 50mmf/1.4 lens! Okay, so we’ve established that the Sears KS Auto is a value-packed camera for very little money. But would you actually want to shoot with one?

Spoiler alert: Cheap camera feels cheap

Let’s start with the KS Auto’s (and XR-2’s) biggest problem, one it shares with other Ricoh SLRs of the era: compared to SLRs from more mainstream brands, it feels like the low-cost camera it is. That’s in large part down to one of the few innovations Ricoh SLRs did have: large swathes of the body and lens barrel are made from polycarbonate, a durable, lightweight plastic used to make DVDs, safety glasses, and bullet-resistant windows. (When Canon switched to polycarbonate bodies in the early 1990s, it was heralded as a great  advance in lightweight cameras. No one seemed to remember that Ricoh got there 15 years before.)

The problem with polycarbonate is that it’s plastic, and for all the miraculous ways materials scientists have enriched our lives, they still haven’t found a way to make plastic feel like anything other than plastic. The weight benefits are notable: the KS Auto (and XR-2s) weighs in at 19.8 oz (560g), an ounce-and-a-quarter (30g) lighter than a Nikon FE and quarter-pound (120g) less than a Pentax K2.

The Rikenon lenses are notably lighter than the metal-barrel Pentax lenses as well. Besides all that plastic under your fingers, the KS Auto telegraphs its discount price in other ways. When you release the shutter, the motion of the mechanism can just about be measured on the Richter scale, and it’s loud—ka-KLINK!

The winder lever doesn’t have the long, luxuriant pull of some other period SLRs; rather, it feels like it’s advancing the film and cocking the shutter in the most cost-effective way possible. I bet Ricoh was a boon for camera stores back in the day: having a customer handle an XR-2 and a Nikon FE back-to-back would be an easy way to convince them to spend half again as much money on the Nikon.

My favourite viewfinder: Like, ever

In terms of the user interface, however, I don’t think it gets much better than the KS Auto (and XR-2). Once you’ve used a viewfinder with a match-needle meter, will you ever want to go back to anything else?

For those unfamiliar, a match-needle meter has a list of shutter speeds down the side of the viewfinder. In the XR-2 and KS Auto, a transparent blue needle shows the speed you’ve selected with the shutter dial, while a black needle shows what the meter determines is the proper speed for the aperture you’ve selected. (Yep, Pentaxians, same as the KX and K2.)

Twist the dials until the needles line up and your exposure is set. In Automatic mode, the black needle shows which speed the camera will use for yours selected aperture. What I like about match-needles, as opposed to centre-the-meter or go/no-go LEDs, is that they show you exactly how far you are from the correct exposure.

There’s more: like the Pentax KX/MX and Nikon FE, the KS Auto has a “Judas window” that shows the aperture reading at the top of the viewfinder, though it’s tricky to see in dim light. Focusing aids include a split-image finder surrounded by microprisms. Ricoh puts the split at a 45-degree angle, which makes it easier to use on objects with strong horizontal lines. (Frankly, I’m amazed how few mainstream camera manufacturers picked up on this useful feature.)

Cool stuff you’ll actually use

Controls are entirely conventional for a classic-era SLR, with a shutter dial up top, aperture on the lens ring, and film-speed and exposure compensation at the rewind crank. Like most cams of this era, the shutter speed dial is set back from the front edge of the camera, so you have to grasp it with two fingers rather than roll it with your shutter-release finger as you can with newer SLRs.

To use the camera, the winder lever must be pulled out to a stand-off position, similar to a Pentax; when the winder is pushed in, it locks the shutter button, which is very handy. But while Pentaxes leave the meter on when the winder lever is out, if you’re shooting manual on the KS Auto, you must hold the shutter button part-way down to get a meter reading. I find that annoying.

In terms of technical features, the KS Auto is nicely equipped by the standards of its era. The shutter is an electronically timed, vertical-travel, metal-leaf Copal unit, as used by Nikon. It has manually selectable speeds ranging from 1/1000 down to four seconds, and while it’s rated to eight seconds in automatic mode, I’ve found that, like the Pentax M-series cameras, the KS Auto/XR-2 will accurately meter much longer exposures.

Since the shutter is electronic, its timing is unlikely to go out of adjustment. Of course, that also means the camera requires batteries to fire at anything other than Bulb and flash sync speed (X), which is 1/125.

High-quality images, meh-quality mechanism

And what of the photos? One of the best aspects of the KS Auto is that it uses the K-mount, so it’s compatible with Pentax lenses, though photos taken with my Rikenon (aka Sears Auto) lenses look just fine to me. The photos you see here were taken with a variety of Pentax and Rikenon lenses, and I think they speak for themselves – and the variety of locations (California, Spain, Italy, Virginia, Tokyo, New York, France) speaks to how far and wide I’ve travelled with these cameras, and how much I trust them.

One could argue that my trust may be somewhat unfounded, as these aren’t the most robust cameras. I’ve bought a few Ricoh and Sears cams that were jammed, and was able toget them working again by taking off the bottom plate and fiddling with the mechanism. (By the way, if you find a Ricoh SLR with the mirror stuck up, good chance it means the batteries are dead, installed backwards, or not making contact. Turning the shutter dial to B or X should drop the mirror.) Broken-off self-timer levers are a common ailment, and no self-timer means no mirror lock-up.

One of my KS Autos jammed while out on a shoot and refused to un-jam, which put an early end to a day of shooting. I’ve yet to find a repair shop that specialises in Ricohs, and I can understand why one might hesitate to spend $100 CLA-ing a $25 camera. Still, that’s the beauty of the Sears KS Auto (and the Ricoh XR-2): You can buy four or five of them for the cost of a single Nikon FE. If one breaks, you’ll have plenty of spares!

The ultimate knock-around camera

I’m sure you can see why the Sears KS Auto has become one of my go-to travel cameras. It’s light and reasonably compact. It looks rather dull and non-descript, which I figure is good protection against snatch-and-grab camera thieves. If it does get stolen, or if I do something stupid like drop it into a lake, I can replace it for little more than the cost of a few rolls of film.

And it’s not like I’m compromising on my images: the Sears KS Auto has all the same features as my favourite manual-focus Pentax SLRs, it uses the same lenses, and it takes great pictures. Would I recommend the Sears KS Auto to others? Abso-Kosmo-lutely. These cameras may not feel like a million bucks – or a Nikon F3 – but the Sears KS Auto (and Ricoh XR-2) has features that go toe-to-toe with some of the best manual-focus SLRs ever made, and delivers them at a fraction of the cost.

That’s why I think the Sears KS Auto is the best-value manual-focus 35mm SLR I’ve stumbled across. Just do me a favour and don’t buy one until I’ve had time to grab a couple more, okay?

Sears KS Auto/Ricoh XR-2/XR-2s

FOR: Low price, great feature set, uses the Pentax K-mount.

AGAINST: Feels unrefined, boring styling, prone to jamming.

VERDICT: If there’s a better bargain-priced MF SLR, I’ve yet to find it—and I’ve been looking.

Specifications

· Year of introduction: 1979 (Ricoh XR-2: 1977)

· Original price: US$354.50 w/ 50mm f/1.4 lens (about $1,400 in 2024 dollars)

· Exposure modes: Manual, aperture-priority automatic

· Focus: Manual

· Film advance: Manual

· Lens mount: Pentax K bayonet

· Shutter: Electronic, metal-blade, vertical travel

· Shutter speed range: 1/1000–8s (automatic), 1/1000–4s + bulb (manual)

· Flash sync speed: 1/125

· Film speed range: 12–3200ASA

· Meter: Silicon photo diode (SPD), centre-weighted, TTL, open aperture

· Meter display: Match needle

· Viewfinder info: Aperture, shutter speed, flash ready

· Focusing aids: Diagonal split-screen with microprismcollar

· Exposure compensation: Yes, +/-2 stops

· Battery: LR-44 alkaline (2)

· Flash: Hot shoe connection

· Self-timer: Yes

· DOF preview: Yes

· Mirror lock-up: Yes (activated by self-timer)

· Motor drive: Available (KS Auto, XR-2s)

· Data back: Not available

· Weight (body only): 19.8 oz/560 g