MiNT Camera has released an update about its proposed 35mm film camera, which was announced last year.
Creator and MiNT Camera founder Gary Ho published a blog post on Tuesday (14 March) showing the latest stage of the prototype’s construction.
The update shows the partly disassembled camera, with the camera’s body broken into three separate pieces. The prototype bears a strong resemblance to the Rollei 35 family of cameras from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Ho also said that MiNT Camera’s blog updates – which require typing an email address to access – will serve as a way of choosing testers for pre-production cameras.
Ho said: “In the future, we will need testers for the camera, and this blog will be the first place we look. We want to make sure that our testers are educated and understand the background of this camera. So, if you have been following this blog for a while and love film photography, you’re probably a good fit!”
A second image shows the partly disassembled camera front on, showing some of the electronic circuitry. Ho closed with: “We ought to make faster progress.”
The update follows a lengthier post in January which went into more detail about the new camera’s shutter.
“This is the shutter, borrowed from existing Mint camera designs and has proven to work well. Although the basic design hasn’t changed, we upgraded the speed of this shutter electronically to make it faster. It took us quite a while just to get this part right – battling with shutter speed testers, high speed cameras, a lot of components, and some clever programming… man am I glad it works now and I really hope it’ll pay off.”
He added that MiNT Camera, which is based in Hong Kong, had experienced some supply chain issues which made creating a 35mm camera at the current time more complicated.
“Nowadays, one of the biggest challenges is getting the right components for your design. Sometimes you design something, and it can’t be mass produced at a reasonable cost, you have to redesign it. We try to be creative and work around whatever inventory the supply chain has to offer. Sometimes it means the components have to be completely reinvented.”
He added that the company’s experience making their previous cameras, such as the instant film-shooting RF70 and TL70, had helped them overcome many of these issues with the current design.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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A reboot of the Rollei 35 looks interesting when recent camera offerings are variations on a theme of fixed focus plastic fantastic.
Can hardly read the article- just a sea of google ads partially/fully obscuring the text! And thats at 75% magnification!! At 100% the article/site becomes an absolure nightmare!
Hi Marcus, I recently tried bringing down the amount of ads and it seemed to have worked for most readers. Please send screenshots to foto.dowling@gmail if you can so I can look at adjusting settings if need be. Thanks
S