When I was in my late teens/early 20's, I was using a couple of Pentax K1000s, with the lenses I could afford at the time. Those were the days of peering through the back pages of Shutterbug to find a gem in the used equipment ads, or sneaking down to the photo district to look at the rows upon rows of used gear at the brick-and-morter shops that proliferated in NYC's downtown in the pre-internet days (Lens & Reprographics! Adorama and B&H at their old locations! Olden, Willoughby's and tens of other mom-and-pop size stores, each with its own odd-ball collection of working gear!). But, I was leaving the US to live in another country and wanted to "upgrade" so traded in the K1000's my father's old Praktika and a novelty spycam of my grandfather's (and all of my cash) and I bought a new Pentax LX. The thing that pushed me over the edge on that extravagant purchase was the LX's light metering, and the electronically controlled shutter, which I thought was going to make my photography better. Turns out that a third of a stop plus or minus wasn't that big a deal with the way I was processing film at the time, but I didn't know that until I had tried the LX out for a while. I did like the auto-exposure mode though, and I did use the LX sometimes with with an auxilliary waist level finder in the street, which was a novelty to me. The LX was a great fit for the kind of photography that I was doing . . .
but I was lured by the promise/premise of autofocus. So in the early 1990's I traded my entire Pentax kit, including all the lenses, for a Nikon F4s at Olden Camera in NYC, and for a single lens: the 50 /1.4. This too was an upgrade, as the autofocus features and autometering meant that I was routinely getting shots that I had been "missing" (mostly due to my own lack of skill) with the LX. I know that the F4 gets a bad rap these days, but I frickin' loved the thing. I still have it, sitting on a shelf, top-LCD bleeds and all. Never had it serviced, and it never, ever hiccuped in operation. When I look through my contact sheets in the 1990's and compare them to those from the 1980's they are distinguished by the images spot-on metering and the quality of the focus. I don't want to say that the Nikon lenses were necessarily sharper than their Pentax counterparts (Que: FLAMEWAR!!! - Ready? Fight!), but I appreciated that each Nikon focal length had a fast version of the lens out there, while Pentax was mostly stuck at f:2.8 in my most-used focal length. [Pentax fanboys: don't despair. I have, over the years, re-purchased all of the Pentax primes I had, and then some . . . at pennies on the dollar. The MF-A lenses can be had for a song, compared to their new prices, but that's another story]. My use of the F4 gave way to a Canon digi-rebel with its tiny viewfinder, and then a Canon 5D, with its gorgeous, (if maddening for MF) focusing screen. Were these upgrades? Well, yes in the sense that I saved a lot of time on scanning and spotting negatives. But no, not in the sense that the images were more technically capable out of the Canons than out of the Nikons.
And then came the Nikon D3, which ushered the Canons out the door and allowed me for the first time no-compromise digital with all my existing Nikon lenses. Now THAT was an upgrade. On a price-per-image-shot basis, I think that has been the least expensive camera. The thing is still clicking away, although I use it less now that I have a higher resolution Pentax K-1 (for use with all those tasty Pentax primes). See, one of the things that has changed since the introduction of practical, popular, digital in the early 2000's is high ISO performance. So it really no longer matters that my Pentax 100mm lens maxes out at f:2.8. My attitude now is that I choose really fast lenses for subject isolation, but with ISO 1600 rending (for me, at the print sizes I make) essentially the same dynamic range as ISO 200, an f:2.8 lens can be used for its optical quality only.
The current siren, pulling me towards the rocky shoals? Why the Nikon Z9, of course. But the stratospheric price has held me back. I have crossed over the "hump" of my earning years when spending more than a month's salary on a single piece of photo gear is not a practical option. Oh, I could probably eBay all the gear sitting unused on the shelf these days and make it happen. But that would mean saying goodbye to the M2, M5, R4s, Speedgraphic, Wisner, Rolleis, Hassies etc. etc., and those toys are just too much fun to jettison so casually. Oddly, the Z9 would only be a marginal upgrade in terms of image quality over the Pentax K-1 (real, but small). So I have held off.
Truthfully, for the stuff I like to do, the Nikon D3 was good enough. And the very real advances in imaging chip performance have only yielded me marginal improvements in my work since then. I still feel the tug, though . . .
