The teaser campaign for the new Pentax film compact camera has gathered momentum, with a new video shared on social media.
An Instagram Reel video which was unveiled on the weekend featured the sound of a manual camera advance amid shots of indistinct colour before the screen showed the number “17”.
The video was first shared on Saturday (18 May) and has fuelled further speculation about the camera, which was first mooted as part of a film camera project by Pentax’s parent company Ricoh Imaging at the end of 2022.
Few firm details of the camera were released for most of 2023 other than the camera would be a compact and featuring manual film advance.
Pentax designer Takeo “TKO” Suzuki said in a YouTube video in May 2023: “Our goal is to develop a camera that younger photographers will enjoy – our development effort is focused on this goal. We want to make a camera that makes taking photos a joy and that’s a pleasure to carry around every day.”
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By the start of this year there were enough clues in interviews in Japan to fuel speculation that the camera would be a half-frame model – something Ricoh Imaging confirmed in March (along with the fact it will be a zone focus model).
“First of all, the camera is basically designed for vertical-format photos,” Suzuki said in a video this March. “It provides a vertical format image when you look into the viewfinder, and the basic format of image framing is also vertical.”
The video now has people guessing as to the significance of the number “17”, with commenter suggesting everything from a countdown to the camera’s unveiling to the lens’s focal length to the dimensions of the half-frame image (which works out to around 17mm across).
No further information on the camera’s released date has been shared publicly by Ricoh imaging.
If Pentax’s new compact camera does indeed come out soon, it may be one of two new film compacts released this year. MiNT Camera’s Rollei 35AF – an autofocus full-frame 35mm compact based on the much-loved Rollei 35 compact – is also expected to be released later this year.
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.
