Japan Camera Hunter is designing a 35mm 'premium compact' camera

I asked what models you mentioned are new cameras. This is new. You missed the point...again. And now you are speculating that it may have no parts new in 5 years...well, let me remind you none of the old cameras you mentioned are new, or have new parts NOW. My but you sure like to argue. Have you learned how to do restoration on film yet?

I hadn't realised how the prices of premium compacts had held up so well. A contax T2 looks to be about £500 plus

Not only £500 plus, but if it breaks half way into the first film you ever put through it it's typically unrepairable.

Hi @Androole, you make a very good point which I had not appreciated.

My little Olympus mju is stlll going strong. but I guess they don't all last. I look forward to seeing this gentleman's offerings now!

@pancho_rivera, a foreigner living in Japan who makes a good living buying cameras and re-selling them from his web store. He also searches for cameras that are requested by his clients. He knows the market.

He sells JCH Street Pan film in 35mm http://www.freestylephoto.biz/category/2-Film/Black-and-White-Film?mfg%5B%5D=287 It was popular and due to requests he is coming out with 120 roll film. BTW Street Pan is a Private Label, of a film that was NOT available as photo film.

i own a gr a 1 1.7 and apsc version .... no smaller still like an olympus xa

Article is talking about a film camera.

and at dpr no less ... go figure

@cosinaphile, DPR is using an old and $uck$e$$ful technique known as follow the money. If Mr Bellamy gets it right, I'd expect that Amazon will sell them.

Only the Nikon 8000/9000 were big but only about the size of a Macintosh Iici. The little one's about the size of a carton of cigarettes. The Kodaks and Leafs were bigger.

@MrBrightSide, like all old electronics they became unrepairable. Who wants to spend big-bucks on something that can die at any minute and is un-repairable?

The Nikon scanners, when new, were great. Some died from electronic failures, and some were scrapped when their owners decided "film is dead" or just no longer wanted them. The ones for sale on ePrey often do not have film holders, SCSI cards, and various other issues. The sellers claim untested and want major prices for them. Or, they claim "good condition" but clearly have absolutely no idea if the units work or not. If you have an older computer that will accept a SCSI card, there are old SCSI Nikon and Minolta scanners that may be worth buying if the price is low. Maybe they will work; maybe they will not.

I still have a Minolta dedicated film scanner. About the size/shape of a loaf of bread, for what that's worth. It still works perfectly, except Apple dumped support for the software (and Image Capture doesn't recognise it either, grr), so I have to boot off a Snow Leopard drive to use it, which is a pain. Any tips on free scanning software, anyone?

Nope

The schampoo you flush down the shower drain every day is worse for the environment than most photography chemicals.

Chemicals? Have you had a look at the heavy metals under the hood of your latest and greatest digimon? Just what the world does not need: unwanted, unloved digital crap ending up in landfill because dealers cannot move them. Yes, it's happening.

I still have the Rollei 35se and 35s.
With fuji velvia slides or kodachrome 25 or kodak extar 25 and 100iso negative film, I had really really good results from the Zeiss sonnar f2.8 lenses.
Used hyperfocal focusing so mostly f5.6 to f11. So shoot from the hip, was faster than most people with af cameras. The se was quick with metering too.
I do miss using them. But I am a sucker for mechanical solid engineering.
But yes, the digital cameras allow me more faffing and experimenting and high ISO pictures. I still have a few enlargements hanging in the corridor at 60*40cm which to my eyes look about perfect, even close up.

There really were quite alot weren't there. Ricoh did one. The Contax T2, Nikon did one in 35mm and 28mm flavours, there was the Olympus XA...

Or where they aperture priority?

Check out the Braun Paxette too. Plentiful and much cheaper than the Rollei and barely bigger. Small does NOT equate to light though!

@ John Clinch. The XA needs a battery for metering and its electronic shutter so is not a manual camera per se, but the little Rollei 35 models, I have one of each, only use a battery for the cross-coupled exposure meter. Otherwise, they are fully functional as manual cameras as shutter and aperture settings can be set independently without a battery.

@The Davinator, it's about convenience, gear and how you want to spend your time.

I'm not a lab-rat. I haven't developed a roll of film since the 1960s. I don't own developing tanks, etc. I haven't printed a picture since the 1960s. It's not my thing.

I don't own a scanner an I've never ever owned an ink-jet printer. No G.A.S. and no expensive gear for me.

I prefer to have a pro develop and scan my film. Yes it may get expensive, but I've saved a ton of money and time by not owning/using the needed gear.

Very true. I always had a lab do the processing and scanning for weddings I did up until I stopped a few years back. Film is easy.

While I guess it's potentially cheap if you don't print it and don't value the time. BTW I still have all the kit but don't do it myself anymore as it's just a time sink, especially printing. I don't buy bulk film and didn't buy bulk chemicals (though in decent quantities and IIRC it wasn't 0.30 anythings per roll).

Printing has nothing to do with film or digital capture. That shows a complete lack of depth in the topic. I use PMK Pyro, and it all works out to $0.30 a roll. I dont really care if you use bulk or paid more. Film doesnt need to be expensive.

Let me pass your note on to artists who paint pictures, or sketch...telling them that be ause it takes longer than a photo...they dont value their time.

Are you for real?

For me film was expensive and enormous hassle. You'd take an evening shot and the lab would autowhite balance the sky back to neutral.

My film scanner cost more than a digital SLR but produced less quality than my D70s. The D70s did 6 straight years and cost the same as buying processing printing about 25 films, with a great lens

And yes D70 has way more features than some clunky manula SLR

Interesting, you live somewhere without the internet? $20 is an absurd price for someone to sell all that for.

Surely there's a zero missing in that price figure.

Arastoo.... I would’ve easily handed over $200 for the lot, but the lady said $20, must admit I did feel a tad guilty though

I would take a nice F3HP over this ANY day. 👍🏼

I think you will be surprised. Prices on topline compacts have basically doubled to trebled in last two years. A T3 or a tc-1 is easily $800 now. A T is waaay more than $200 now.

Because the news feed is not limited to digital photography...that's why.

Why would you waste time writing a comment like this?

John Clinch...They are pretty intelligent people so I am sure they can work something out?

Because some people are so narrow minded that anything that doesn't exactly float their own particular boat is 'junk'. They could just look at a web page full of articles about many and varied topics, choose to read the ones that interest them and ignore the ones that don't, but that isn't enough for their egos, they have to make their bold statements along the lines of 'film is dead', 'film is junk' etc.

I would suggest that film is hardly 'junk' (as sales figures seem to prove) and a lot of people who shoot digital also have at least a passing interest in other elements of photography such as but not limited to film and film cameras. So, for those people, me included, who find it interesting and refreshing to have a bit of film photography related news then I say great...keep it coming. If you don't like it, ignore it and read only the pure digital related news items/threads etc.

Film is "off topic" here and the vast majority of film camera stuff here has been cameras that would have been dismissed as "junk" during the period when film was king. Most film photography magazines would not have even bothered reviewing a "point and shoot with a decent 28mm or 35mm lens" -- so now a digital photography site awaits it with such great anticipation that a rumor it is under development is important news? This is filler, not news.

I like to shoot film, so find film-related news useful. I also like to shoot digital, so read those post as well. I've never shot a video in my life, so scroll past video-related content because it doesn't interest me.

Of course film magazines reviewed high end compacts. You are just babbling

@ProfHankD - Film is not off topic here. The news feed is not a digital camera only feed. This has been said a million times...by the admin and mods included.

As to junk...seems some are narrowminded to think that art need be created by one type of media....otherwise it is junk. What an ignorant viewpoint.

Why do you read it then? This can't be the only topic on here that causes you grief. So instead of sticking to topics that confirm your technological bias, you call what a fairly noticeable and healthy amount of people appreciate and enjoy junk? I bet as a kid you were one of those people who liked to go around poking sleeping people in the eye with a stick.

I think it is great we have these choices, why have disdain for choice?

It isnt a rumour. Do you suffer from some comprehension deficit?

If you, I or dpreview want to keep people or get new people interested in photography beyond smart phones, then you have to keep giving people a reason to keep looking at it. That comes from good work, fun advances and assigning anything and everything some kind of value including what's old is new again. This site has my attention more than it used to because it has really diversified it's content. I don't like everything I see and usually a headline is all I need to know in order to make a choice to skip an article or not.

Film use is a stable and fun niche way to arrive at an image, people have certainly mellowed out on the film is dead thing in the past few years. So it stands to reason that having each medium be treated with respect and intrigue directly serves to keep each medium and the whole of photography beyond smart phones healthy.

The making of a compact 35 is certainly leaning towards to accessorize end of film use but it is all good, really.

"possible future introduction of a not-at-all-high-end point-and-shoot "

a 28mm auto compact with manual iso settings and exposure compensation is high end specs. I can only think of 3 or 4 that could ever do that. If meter could go up to 3200 or 6400 then it could be great street shooter if glass is decent

Motion pictures, from the beginning, used half-frame (18×24 mm) An Olympus film Pen camera used half-frame, and were small https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_Pen

Half-frame film is 1.333 (4:3) format. The Motion Picture Industry used the Academy ratio of 1.375:1. This is an aspect ratio of a frame of 35mm film when used with 4-perf Vertical pulldown. It was standardized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the standard film aspect ratio in 1932.

The Horizontal 8 perf 3:2 fromat was invented by Oskar Barnack of Leica, not the motion picture industry.

Lots of formats fought it out in the early days of film. Nikon's first camera used 35mm film but with a frame only 32mm wide, or a 4:3 aspect ratio. Not very practical with labs setup to handle 3:2, 24x36. Standardization is a wonderful thing.

It is SLR lenses that tend to be big. My 35mm Minox has a tiny lens despite the 24x36mm format. Voigtlander 15mm, 21mm and 25mm lenses for Leica are small, as are the recent 28mm Leica f2.8, the 1970s 40mm f2 and the recent
50mm f2.8.
M4/3 is fine and the digital images stand a lot of enlargement. Would a half-frame film image be as good?

If you want a good choice of film to put in a camera then 35mm is the way to go with a compact camera.

I have never heard anyone admire a photograph for it’s efficiency. 4:3 may save some camera resources, but digital screens designed for people to view use wider aspect ratios. If the reason you take photos is to feel good about your camera, by all means stick to 4:3.

@Dansclic. Maybe one photo of your meal will suffice instead of fifteen. 😁

T4.. a super camera! very fond memories of that camera/lens. even now i look on ebay for a bargain but they are never there .(bargains i mean :)

Did you donate part of the proceeds to Goodwill?

@capeminiol - Come now, don't shame everyone for making a profit. Sure it could be argued that the incredibly noble thing to do would be to donate a large portion of the sale to the nonprofit where the camera was purchased, but being noble and foolish can look very much the same. When the temperatures drop and homeless people are shivering on the street I go load up on hot meals and gloves and start handing them out, but I wouldn't do as you suggest. No one was deceived or swindled to get these cameras. It's like finding a gold coin on the beach, you praise your good fortune and don't go out of your way to relieve yourself of it.

Funny thing. My 95 year old mother is still taking pictures with the black T4 I gave her over 25 years ago.
I'm still using my Zeiss Contina IIA!

Hipster? What's a hipster? You obviously dont follow the demographic of current film users.

Sounds like you're an angry person with a chip on their shoulder.

From where do you know that the aperture was stuck? If it was a SLR, the lens likely was set fully on manual that the aperture remained in the same position....ideal for street photography with film.

Gee, you are so clever to use the term "hipsters" when referring to film. And hipsters, in your mind are what? Are Leica users in their 60s hipsters?

Or teenage girls I see? Or professionals in their 40’s? No..it is always thrown out that these “hipsters” are real photographers or artists like a digital user. Very simple minded .

The term "hipster" originated in the 1940s as an equivalent 1930s term "hepcat." In the 1950s and 1960s, it was used as alternatives to "beatnik" and "hippie." It's come to mean "a person who follows the latest trends and fashions, especially those regarded as being outside the cultural mainstream."

Film sales growing...digital camera sales shrinking. Sounds like film is doing better than digital cameras right now.

Vinyl will likely outlive CDs and film will likely outlive most regular digital cameras.

The Davinator wrote: "Film sales growing...digital camera sales shrinking. Sounds like film is doing better than digital cameras right now."

Only if you define "better" as being completely unrelated to market share.

Check the profitability data from Fuji in 2016: Losses in the digital market (even with their successful mirrorless cameras!) but profits in the analog film-based division. Also Polaroid is back from the dead....film is still a niche, but a slowly growing one again.

Long live film :)

Better is completely unrelated to market share. McDonalds by your definition is the best restaurant then. Cell phones the best cameras. MP3 the best audio format.

"Better is completely unrelated to market share."

But "doing better" (your phrase) with relation to sales is very much related to market share.

You created a straw man, suggesting that I said that quality correlates with popularity. I did not. Please don't do that again.

I’m not saying film is doing better, but “doing better” can refer to rate of growth.

I referred to the rate of growth...which was the topic of the post. There is no strawman here...but there does appear to be a chip on your shoulder.

@The Davinator: I never stated or implied that there was correlation between popularity and quality. You created that straw man.

Comparing sales of 35mm film to sales of digital cameras is illogical. One is a consumable media for a type of camera and the other is a camera that needs no consumable media.

None of the major camera companies define "doing better" in the way you do. You've not seen Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Hasselblad, Pentax, etc. redirecting their efforts away from digital cameras and towards development and sales of film cameras.

No one will ever seriously contend that 35mm film is technically superior to digital.

But who said anything about being technically superior? It's fun.

And with a $100 SLR or fixed lens rangefinder with a fast ~50mm, you can leave plenty of room in the budget to shoot an awful lot of film and have a great time making some pretty pictures.

Film is a different medium than digital - both have their pros and cons, neither one is "better" than the other. You can achieve with film effects not reproducible with digital (for example halo effects) and vice-versa. That's why I shoot both, digital and film in about 50:50 ratio.

Current color negative film is amazing. +6 stops and still looks great. Plus, you don't need a top of the line camera to get this amazing performance. With film, as the emulsions improve (and they do improve) you don't buy a new camera. You just buy new film.

http://carmencitafilmlab.com/wp-content/uploads/Bracketing400H_OVER.jpg

I shot 2 rolls of film just the other day. I had a great time doing it. I had more fun shooting those 2 rolls with my contax rx than I've had shooting digital for the ladt 4 years. It's not about which is better, it's about the experience. If you cant have fun doing something then what's the point of doing it at all. Unless your getting paid I suppose

Androole wrote: "There's obviously a reason why he is embarking on this ambitious project..."

Because it's a way to earn money that he finds more rewarding than an office job?

And why not. I wish him all the best. If nothing else, his FB feed and IG are full of gorgeous photographs of cameras.

He has a bast knowledge of the current status of film cameras. The sompact market is running out of parts for repairs...thus his desire to create his own. Seems some people get so defensive.

I listened to an interview with him where he discussed the issues he was having finding compacts that he could put up for sale. They are getting more scarce. He was looking at something along the line of Contax compacts. So yes, thatnis what is motivating him. I'm not defensive at all. I am relaying what he has said. The real question is why his motives are being scrutinized in such a negative manner here.

You don't know what is motivating him. That he observed parts scarcity doesn't mean that's why he's making a camera. Similarly, that he wrote "I would dearly love to make a compact camera," doesn't mean that he's motivated to make one solely for personal satisfaction.

You're being defensive. No one is scrutinizing him in a negative manner. There's nothing negative in suggesting that someone could be motivated to earn a living doing something he finds rewarding.

Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say ISO Selecta)

:-)

He stated that because it wont have auto ISO via DX encoding. Not sure why you think this means digital...rather bizarre comment.