Pentax announces that they're working on new film cameras!

[Helge]

You must certainly be young and foolish because no one older and wiser is acting the way you are. How can you handle really important issues if you come unglued over trifles like this?

Unglued?
From Mr. Glueless himself?

Out to take some selfies.

 

[Agulliver]

I don't see any logic in Pentax competing with Instax....Fuji already have that market. Pentax are looking at a market segment that currently isn't provided for, except with second hand cameras that are themselves rising in price such that they cost more than they did when new. They *appear* to be looking first at a competent 35mm P&S camera. This has a lot of good sense behind it because the used market for similar cameras from the 90s has exploded in recent times. Just try buying one of the Mju-2 cameras, working and recently tested with film. They're typically selling for £250-300 and sometimes more with sustained increases year on year. There's plenty of scope for a decent P&S 35mm camera with a warranty and spare parts availability to sell in the £300-400 range....or 350 euros/dollars.

I took a selfie on New Years Day at 2am. Club owner jokingly suggested I did a 30 minute stint behind the bar, so I did. And took a selfie. I am 50 in three weeks....I still get drunk in clubs and occasionally take selfies. I saw a meme the other day which suggested 50 year olds should spend our weekends sitting on a heat pad eating nachos. Shrugs....you do what makes you happy.

 

[Helge]

I'm surprised Pentax is not doing a "me, too" and coming out with their own version of the Instax. Usually, that's the way companies do things. Let the other company do the heavy lifting and then come to the market with a better product at a better price. Of course, the film - like most consumables - is where the money is and that could be the hang-up since it'd be tough for Pentax to compete with Fuji on the film front.

Hopefully, the camera Pentax has in mind will come in lots of bright fun colors and camo. It would also be cool if they offered different wraps or hard-shells for it based on popular things like video game characters, famous singers, movie stars, sodas, sports teams, etc. Maybe something glitter-based or glow in the dark so you can find your camera under piles of clothes and stuffed toys for those late-night snack-eating selfies.

You know what else would be cool? A multicolored filter wheel/lens protector built into the camera that you can rotate over the lens to give you different effects like a soft look, vignetting, extra flaring, and whatever will make a starburst on someone's tooth when they smile.

Plus, I'd like a selection of standard and programmable sounds for the shutter so, for example, when it was pressed you could hear a short clip of the soundtrack to Frozen, Encanto, or Moana instead of just a click.

I'm kind of giddy over the possibilities.

The glitter gets everywhere.

 

[dutchsteammachine]

Fairly simple P&S with a good lens seems like the best choice to start. If it sells, branch out to other camera's.

Will Pentax come out with a new Super 8 camera before Kodak? Its not impossible...

 

[pentaxuser]

Fairly simple P&S with a good lens seems like the best choice to start. If it sells, branch out to other camera's.

Will Pentax come out with a new Super 8 camera before Kodak? Its not impossible...

I agree with your first sentence and wasn't this Pentax's plan anyway? However anyone coming out with a new Super 8 seems fairly unlikely to me

pentaxuser

 

[Helge]

Fairly simple P&S with a good lens seems like the best choice to start. If it sells, branch out to other camera's.

Will Pentax come out with a new Super 8 camera before Kodak? Its not impossible...

As said before, there’s a chance that if it’s too simple, people won’t really see the point, no matter warranty or repairability. If it’s say ≈$500 there is still a lot of similar old options out there.
You and I will get one, sure. But how many else will?
They really need to enter the market with a bang, if even a minor one, and not a simple repeat of past glories.

 

[Cholentpot]

Fairly simple P&S with a good lens seems like the best choice to start. If it sells, branch out to other camera's.

Will Pentax come out with a new Super 8 camera before Kodak? Its not impossible...

The cost of shooting Super8 or any MP is well out of reach of most people. Roughly 5 min of footage is going to cost more than I spend on film in a year after the development and scan.

 

[Sirius Glass]

I don't know about better taste, but better judgement for sure. No one needs to see that mug.)

One shot like that could crack the lens.

 

[dutchsteammachine]

As said before, there’s a chance that if it’s too simple, people won’t really see the point, no matter warranty or repairability. If it’s say ≈$500 there is still a lot of similar old options out there.
You and I will get one, sure. But how many else will?
They really need to enter the market with a bang, if even a minor one, and not a simple repeat of past glories.

There are certainly a lot of good options out there. But both of us have seen the price of medium and high end P&S increasing. I really regret selling my Canonet QL17 two years ago.

A few high end P&S camera's have even reached critical acclaim and can sell for many hundreds of dollars.

Sure you can still find a plastic fantastic at thrift stores, the occasional nicer metal camera too, but chances are rarer and some stores are upping their pricing, a lot.

CLA prices have also been increasing exponentially, a cost people often forget to factor in.

And remember that the Reflex Kickstarter a brand that never ever made anything ever before got funded 130k by the people. A camera that aside from the shutter speed and some stupid stretch goals about modularity was pretty much A K1000.

Now I know nothing of how to start a factory line, so I don't know how much the R&D, training, tooling and setup costs would be.


What type of camera do you suggest Pentax should start with, and in which price range?

 

[Radost]

I was wrong. There is one camera they can make that will be a winner, they have the resources to make and I would 200% buy:
Pentax Panoramic mechanical shutter camera with a few lenses!
I would spend Leica money on a panoramic camera that I know can be serviced and I can own forever.

 

[Radost]

As a Mechanical Engineer (a very old ME) reverse engineering is never as easy and simple as it sounds. For example you need to reverse engineer the tools to that made that 1970 camera, you need to determine the materials used and where they were sourced. Just a couple of things off the top of my head.

With modern tools the Chinese can copy a Leica MP and if the materials are the same the camera will be 99% the same.

 

[Roger Cole]

And I suppose that enginner would work for free? Remember that a full mechanical camera may have hundreds of parts, many of those most likely arent made anymore since they are obsolete. They would have to be custom made. You will need to make enough of them to made it profitable.

No one said they are impossible to be made. Problem is how to made them in a cheap enought way to make a business making them.

To relate it to your example, I dont see anyone churning cheap Volkswagen bettles that had been reverse enginnenered.

Marcelo

Well you couldn't sell a reverse engineered Beetle anyway, as it wouldn't meet any of the modern emissions and safety requirements. To make it do so would make it even more expensive.

 

[Roger Cole]

A replica Beetle would sell like hotcakes. Can't do it though due to modern safety rules and such.

Would it?

My first car was a 66 Beetle. Biggest pile of rolling junk I've ever seen, much less owned.

 

[Roger Cole]

Recreating a Leica I -- with no rangefinder and no slow speeds, fully mechanical, might be easy but nobody would buy it. Pentax, I am guessing, wants something more sophisticated and mechanically complex.

You should look up the history of the 4 by 5 "point and shoot" Travelwide camera some guys tried to sell on Kickstarter about 7 years ago.. The idea was to make a simple, light 4 by 5 camera that you could carry around with the 90 or 65 mm lens you supplied for it and use it as a kind of snap-shooter.

So basically, we're talking a body with a focusing helical and a lens mount and a film back using sheet film holder, all of it technology that has been around very literally 100 years. How hard could it be?

Damn near impossible, as it turned out. They had problems with parts, with supplies, with design, with light leaks, with manufacturing, with everything. They clammed up and quit answering people asking where their damn camera was. It went more than a year over time and way over budget and when they finally delivered the first cameras they said they were never, ever, doing that again so here's your damn camera leave us alone.

I suspect Pentax has better resources for this project, but it will still be complex. You may be a machinist, and I am supremely confident you could build a lovely camera as a one-off, but they do this for a living.

I eventually got my Travelwide. I already had a 90mm Angulon. It's really a pretty neat little gadget, but you're right - it was SO far behind that most people thought they'd never see theirs.

 

[BHuij]

If they produce a compact 35mm camera that has manual control options for film speed, aperture, shutter speed, and focus, and a halfway decent lens, I'll probably buy one. Closest I can think of that fits that bill is maybe an Olympus XA, and even that leaves a few things to be desired for the kind of shooting I do. But I'm not paying $300 for an XA.

 

[madsox]

Wow! I can't read through all 22 pages of comments here, so I'm sure I don't have much to add - I'm just excited and delighted at this news, and hope like hell it works! I've been a Pentax user since day 1, about 50 years ago. I learned on Dad's Spotmatic, bought myself an MX (yes, I still have it) with the paychecks from my first job, and eventually inherited Dad's 35mm gear when he shifted to digital. Not a huge collection, but I have a complete-for-me set of bodies and lenses and... just wow again.

Learning about this project, seeing the engagement and activity here, it's great! Makes me want to find somebody to CLA a few cameras that haven't been touched in years, go get some film and start shooting.

 

[Cholentpot]

Would it?

My first car was a 66 Beetle. Biggest pile of rolling junk I've ever seen, much less owned.

That's not the point though. It's about the style over substance.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Would it?

My first car was a 66 Beetle. Biggest pile of rolling junk I've ever seen, much less owned.

I drove a 1957 VW while in high school and college and it was the most worthless and unsafe vehicle I have ever been in.

 

[Roger Cole]

I'm surprised that considering how ubiquitous typos resulting from autocorrect are people don't turn it off.

Because then the results from typing on touch screens are even worse, at least for some of us.

I tried turning it off - and turned it right back on again. While it often makes mistakes I found a touchscreen completely unusable at all for text entry beyond a few words with it turned off. YMMV.

 

[Sal Santamaura]

Because then the results from typing on touch screens are even worse, at least for some of us.

I tried turning it off - and turned it right back on again. While it often makes mistakes I found a touchscreen completely unusable at all for text entry beyond a few words with it turned off. YMMV.

I have always loathed touchscreens. More than autocorrect. Irrespective of whether they were on equipment I was developing during an engineering career or on "consumer" devices. Thus, I don't carry a "smart" (stupid) phone and only enter text on a PC keyboard.

 

[MattKing]

I'm glad I don't have to type in my account number on the cash machine/ATM at my bank.
Touch screens have lots of advantages. Text entry isn't one of them.

 

[Agulliver]

Not a big fan of "typing" on touch screens either. I was a world class texter with the old tapping the numbers entry system. Literally world class. I like having a large screen on my smart phone but I almost never write substantial messages on it. Picking out the letters with zero physical feedback is tedious and auto-incorrect is almost as much of a pain as it is a help.

At least the Sinclair ZX81 actually had a physical keyboard. People mocked it at the time. I bet the very same folk use touch screens today with even less physical sensation to determine whether a key has been pressed or not. At least that little black box had 1mm indentations so you could feel something, like if you were on a letter or a gap between letters.

Thinking of cameras, I prefer knobs and dials. Without exception I can find my way through to setting apertures or shutter speeds faster with a mechanical camera than something with a menu system. And it always seems that the settings I actually want to change are buried somewhere in sub-menus.

However, the general assumption is that the first product from Pentax in this project will be an automatic point and shoot camera....not something with all manual controls. That may come later.

 

[Radost]

Dials are cool, Especially on Minolta CL.
I was very surprised how much I started to enjoy the buttons of superme.

 

[pbromaghin]

I have always loathed touchscreens. More than autocorrect. Irrespective of whether they were on equipment I was developing during an engineering career or on "consumer" devices. Thus, I don't carry a "smart" (stupid) phone and only enter text on a PC keyboard.

Exactly. Why on earth would I ever want to deal with a little handheld POS when there are such things as full-size keyboards and 22" monitors?

 

[dutchsteammachine]

The cost of shooting Super8 or any MP is well out of reach of most people. Roughly 5 min of footage is going to cost more than I spend on film in a year after the development and scan.

Well, one super 8 cartridge has room for approximately 3500 individual frames. There are a bunch of super 8 cams that have single frame mode.

So you could take 3500 photos with one cartridge.