Holga pin hole for Pentax Q HLP-PQ

There are very few lenses with a PQ mount in existence and it appears Holga made 3 of them!
Here we examine the plastic pinhole AKA the HLP-PQ.

The HLP-PQ is entirely plastic. You might imagine being able to turn the barrel as if focusing but it won’t turn. The construction is such that the focus wheel, indeed screws into the rear half’s thread with the PQ mount, but the 2 components are glued together. Don’t bother twisting it apart with your hands or even with tools, it simply would not shift. To disassemble, I needed to apply considerable force with a well placed thin flathead screwdriver to pry it open at the thinnest point at a join between the rear mount and the front half of the lens body. I unfortunately ended up breaking away some of the side wall before successfully levering the 2 halves apart. With more care you might be able to avoid a similar mishap.

 

Look at the generous helpings of glue that was applied on the threads! Whoever put this together did not intend for us to get inside it. Note also on my copy, the inside rear half has revealed  some leftover broken parts around the aperture. Something was certainly cemented there but later forcibly removed. We’ll never know what it was, not something I did to it.


Seeing as the threadless outermost sidewalls did nothing but prevent the lens from closing down further than it otherwise could, I trimmed it away. Now not only is it a slimmer package but also provides more latitude for getting closer to the Q’s sensor. I could prune even further later if needed.

Interestingly, as this is pinhole, turning the focus wheel acts like a zoom ring! The closer the pinhole is positioned to the sensor, the wider the field of view and vice versa.
To satisfy my curiosity with the widest possible FOV, I pushed out and separated the pinhole plate that was otherwise glued to the the front half of the lens body. Taped the pinhole plate to the rear mount to see what an image would look like.
I’d say the blurriness is even worse than before but for sure the view was much wider than it was out of the factory. Perhaps the pinhole needs to be smaller to work better with the Q?

I will probably not use the pinhole plate component again to be honest but will put it to one side should I want to come back to it later. More likely, the lens body will be more immediately useful for housing real lenses (the Pentax 07 glass element perhaps) as this provides potential for an easy precise live manual focusing ring!

 

Out of the box and wider view after hack... both blurry.

Without the front and with the slimmer front adorned.