Pentax Film Project

You are right, it's a stupid camera. But it's not stupid of Pentax to make and sell it to enthusiasts. If there are buyers it's a business. And there might be buyers, using film for recreation or art, just as there are people who travel by horse even though we have very excellent electric motorbikes.

I gave up film because it was, even a decade ago, £20/$25 per roll to shoot, and you never knew what you'd done until it came back, which means too late to shoot again if it didn't work. And a failed digital frame has no environmental impact whereas a failed negative is a waste of celluloid, and worse you probably get it printed at 6x4 before you realise it's a failure. With digital you print only the great shots, and the rest you keep on a tiny hard drive, backed up on another tiny hard drive, all automatically indexed by date. I have shelves and shelves of shoeboxes full of prints that I don't look at because sorting through them is a pain.

With digital you're freed up to keep refining a shot by looking at the screen: you learn your craft through giving yourself this feedback.

The quality of modern sensors means the argument 'film is better quality' has largely gone away – at least until you get to 5x4 or 8x10 sheet film. Certainly 35mm roll film is worse than a modern sensor.

You can change 'film speed' from shot to shot with digital. You don't have to wait to use 36 exposures all at the same speed.

You have sensor-shift stabilisation.

Etc etc etc. But that doesn't mean some people won't WANT a film camera.

My biggest concern is that they say they want to make it affordable. It won't be 'very affordable' compared to digital, because of the costs of machining and assembling intricate mechanical parts.

Anyway cost was always the inhibitor for film – the cost of film and processing not of the camera. As they used to say at processing labs, most rolls were 'a Christmas tree at each end and a beach in the middle'.

Paul

James O'Neill wrote:

If no one else will say it

To me it's the stupidest idea I've ever seen with a Pentax name on it.

The combination of being able to able shake reduction to a sensor goes, the idea of usable ISO speeds in the thousands goes (or if you shoot 800-3200 it's insanely grainy.). Over the 6 years I've had the K1 I've been able to do available light photography which just wasn't possible with film.

Environmental impact of film and processing is negative,

Film has a cost and time impact. I was a fairly accomplished printer of black and white film. (Although I haven't been in a darkroom for nearly 20 years). Printing black and white you chose a "grade" of paper which set the steepness of the response curve which you now do with a slider in the software of your choice, but the ability to shape that curve gives so much more control. Burning and dodging to get a print just so was something which might take hours to perfect on the base board of an enlarger (with many "failed" prints creating waste product along the way). Today we do it on screen in a minute or two. Airbrushing blemishes out or compositing exposures is trivial with digital and we share digitally. Shooting film to then scan rather than originating as digital really doesn't gain much, it takes choices away. And the ability to shoot hundreds of frames, and decide if they will be mono or what sort of colour after the event is something we don't get with digital.

I've no idea what the market is for film cameras. Like the cathode-ray-tube TV, VHS tape, or the steam powered automobile, I'm who love them. Heaven help us people are even selling music on cassette tape again.

People who can't remember a world before the iPhone may have a nostalgia for the 1970s but having lived through the 1970sm the world is way better today. (Seriously go live in a world with 3 or 4 channels of TV, no GPS, no mobile phones, no internet, no laptops or tablets for a week. An write me a letter to say how you got on).

Ricoh have nothing to sell me now - unless I go back to shooting APS-C and buy something very wide for the K3-iii and get the DFA*50 as a portrait lens. The only thing I want is a replacement for the K1 - and I look over at my friends with their MILCs and think, yes I love my OVF, I love my Pentax ergonomics, I don't want to switch my lenses or use them with an adapter. I look at their AF experience and mine belongs in age of cassette tapes, and dial-up modems. If I divide pictures into "Focused exactly as I want", "OK but not exact" and "Unsatisfactory" there are too few in the first and too many in the last. And thinking about have I selected the right AF point all the flaming time, and not framing, composition, and timing (plus switching the K1's 4 way controller out of AF point selection and screwing up some other setting) makes me look over at people with Sony and ask if I'm doing any better than clinging on to Pentax out of pure sentiment.

Give me a K1 with a sensor from this decade on the K3-iii's AF (expanded so it covers whole frame not just the central part like the K1) and I can keep going with Pentax for years. Otherwise Ricoh can be the market leader in Film ILCs. But my next camera body will probably be a Sony.