Early Autofocus SLR
The camera is fairly current, but the lens dates back to the early days of Autofocus SLR's. One of the early attempts at autofocus was to leave the SLR unchanged and to put all the autofocus functions in the lens. There were a number of lenses made with this unusual hump on the side that housed the autofocus mechanism. This 28-70mm Zoom lens was made for a wide variety of 35mm SLR's by Vivitar. This particular one is in Pentax K-Mount and is mounted on a Promaster 2000PK, a fairly recent camera still using the Pentax K-mount to interchange lenses. Canon had the T-80 with several lenses of similar design, and Ricoh had a 35-70mm for their cameras, and I am sure there were some other lenses as well. I think Vivitar had a telephoto zoom to pair off with this lens.
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One Model, many changes
I recently added to my supplemental site, KensPix, a fairly abbreviated list and some pictures of changes made to the Kodak 35RF camera over it's production time. My friend Scott Billota (Scott's Photographica - see favorite links) has a very extensive list of changes on the Clarus 35-MS. The famous black brick, the Argus C-3 underwent many changes over it's years of production - there is a site to help you identify where your's falls (sorry, I don't have a link to that one). When I was attending collector shows back in the 70's, I heard that one Leica collector had about 300 Leica B (the one with the Elmar in the Compur leaf shutter) cameras and every one was different in some way. Maybe you have a favorite that has undergone changes also. It can be fun to identify changes. The Kodak 35RF was the first 35mm camera I owned, so it has a sentimental place in my collection.The Kiev made Contax II & III variations claim to be the most cameras made of any camera style. As you can see on my Kiev page though, there are some very distinct changes, particularly on top, over the years, even though the guts may remain about the same (shutter, rangefinder, body shape, etc).
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