2024 may turn out to be quite the year for film photography.
Two companies – the Ricoh-owned Pentax and Hong Kong’s MiNT Camera – have announced compact film camera projects in the past 18 months.
MiNT Camera’s project, updated throughout 2023 with increasing detail, was officially unveiled by MiNT Camera as the Rollei 35AF in January: the camera bears more than a faint resemblance to the Rollei 35 first released in the late 1960s.
The Pentax camera is still not officially green-lit, but the project is far enough through the testing stage for a prototype to have been produced and pictures from it shown during a YouTube video update from lead designer TKO earlier this month.
Kosmo Foto has published several articles on both projects since they were announced, but with both cameras at advanced stages of pre-production (and MiNT Camera having released a new update in the past couple of weeks) it’s a good time to look at both projects and what to expect.
MiNT Camera Rollei 35AF
The latest update from MiNT Camera, released a few weeks ago, gave even more detail about the camera, which is the company’s first 35mm design.
The Rollei 35AF is based on the Rollei 35 family of cameras, of which almost two million were produced from 1966 until 2014. In an interview with Analog Forever magazine in February, MiNT’s founder Gary Ho admitted that the project had taken five years to come this far.
Thought the new camera’s body is heavily influenced by the original Rollei 35 family, the MiNT Camera is distinctly different. Here are the features that have been confirmed so far:
- Autofocus, using a Lidar-based system
- A 35mm five-element coated lens with an aperture range of f/2.8 to f/16 – the original Rollei 35 had a 40mm lens
- Metal construction – at least some of the new camera’s body will be made from metal rather than plastic
- An internal flash (the original Rollei 35 needed an external flash mounted on a hot shoe on the camera body)
- Price of between $650 and $800 (£515 to £635)
Ho told Analog Forever in February that MiNT’s project intended to fix some of the “drawbacks” of the original design, such as “the zone focus, the absence of an automatic function, and no built-in flash for indoor use.
“I understand that these aspects may not be regarded as drawbacks for seasoned photographers, but for most of us who grew up with the iPhone camera, the original Rollei 35 can prove challenging to operate.”
Ho shared with Kosmo Foto the latest images of the camera and some taken with the working prototype, which can be seen in the gallery below:
The Rollei 35 AF’s price might be considered steep compared to the price of a secondhand Rollei 35 (around £250 in the UK for one of the standard models from the 1970s), but a better comparison would be against the best specified compact film camera to have been released in recent years – the Lomography LC-Wide. The LC-Wide can be had for £350 new, but it is a camera without autofocus, with a much slower f/4.5 lens, and utilising much of the design of the existing LC-A and LC-A+ cameras.
MiNT Camera have not yet finalised a release date for the camera, though in earlier posts Ho said the camera was intended to be released by the end of 2024.
The proposed Pentax compact
Ricoh, the Japanese company which owns the Pentax brand, has been happy to march to a different beat the last few years.
While camera companies have deserted the DSLR in favour of mirrorless, Pentax DSLRs continue to be made; there’s even one which will only shoot monochrome images.
Back in 2022, after Leica announced the return of the much-loved M6 rangefinder, Kosmo Foto published a piece predicting which of the major camera makers would be likely to follow Leica’s lead. Our best guess? Pentax.
Mere weeks later, Ricoh Imaging did indeed announce a project geared towards some kind of film camera released under the Pentax brand, though there were at first plenty of caveats that this would not necessarily lead to a new camera.
By early 2023, however, it appeared the project’s initial research had arrived at an initial target: a compact camera. What’s more, according to Pentax designer TKO, the new camera would “bring joy back to taking photos”. By December, there were strong hints the resulting camera would be a half-frame camera, thanks to an interview where Pentax designers referenced the iconic Ricoh Auto Half of the 1960s.
In March, Ricoh Imaging finally confirmed several important aspects of the new Pentax camera:
- The camera will be half-frame 35mm
- It will use a zone-focus system rather than autofocus
- The camera will have manual film advance
- The camera will feature an electronic shutter which has been customised especially for the new camera
- It will feature automatic control of both shutter speeds and apertures
- A control dial will allow certain shooting modes to be selected
Many of the finder details of the camera remain unknown, however, including everything from the focal length and maximum f number of the lens to price and launch date. The most recent update did, however, say that the camera’s lens has taken some design cues from Pentax’s popular Espio range of compacts.
Designer TKO said in the YouTube video that the half-frame was inspired both by the fact most young photographers shoot in vertical format on their phones, and the economics of film in the 2020s. “Compared with the peak of film photography, the price of film is much higher today. This is a very difficult hurdle to overcome in enjoying analogue photography, due to the limited number of photos that can be captured on a single roll of film. The high running costs., including that of development, are also a big issue.”
One tantalising detail about Pentax’s film camera project is that the forthcoming half-frame camera may only be the start. In an interview last year, a French representative of Ricoh Imaging hinted that as many as four film cameras were currently planned – including an SLR (though Ricoh Imaging’s Japanese HQ later poured cold water on the plans).
Could Pentax be about to go all out on the return of the film camera? Stay tuned.
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.
