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?
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.
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...
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...
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 don't know about better taste, but better judgement for sure. No one needs to see that mug.)
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.
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.
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
A replica Beetle would sell like hotcakes. Can't do it though due to modern safety rules and such.
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.
Would it?
My first car was a 66 Beetle. Biggest pile of rolling junk I've ever seen, much less owned.
Would it?
My first car was a 66 Beetle. Biggest pile of rolling junk I've ever seen, much less owned.
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.
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.
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.
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