A soon-to-be-launched digital camera whose images can’t be viewed on the camera has taken its design cues from an iconic German film camera design of the 1970s.
The Rewindpix PS135 camera, which is currently due to be launched in February by designer Xiao Liu, takes inspiration not the house of Leica, however, but from Agfa.
“I designed mine based on the Agfa Optima Sensor 535,” Liu tells Kosmo Foto. “It is my very first film camera since 25 years ago and it is still my favourite film camera ever. Bauhaus-like minimalist look and large viewfinder always draw my attention and I love to use it.
“So, when I was trying to figure out the look of Rewindpix, I immediately thought about bringing back the great design of the Agfa Optima. I skipped the Leica, Fuji like looks, they are so saturated in the current camera market and Agfa deserves more love.”
The camera is billed as a “non-disposable digital ‘film camera” and features the offset outsized viewfinder seen on the Agfa Optima Sensor range of cameras, produced in West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Rewindpix camera, which will be available in two colours, features a manual “advance lever” to activate the camera for the next shot.
The camera has three different filters which can be applied, and these are built directly into the camera, rather than the software, according to Rewindpix. The filters are: B&W (to mimic black-and-white film), Cool (to emulate Fuji colour films) and Warm (based on Kodak colour emulsions)
The camera can take more than 300 shots per charge and has a capacity of 1200 pictures.
Liu said he chose to add Lightroom presets to images after capture to give them a look as close as possible to film, rather than trying to get the effect using the limited processing power of the chip in the camera. “And with customisation options, users can mimic infinite film stocks they like and even the light leak/vignetting effects that are pretty common from film compacts,’ he added.
“There are too many similar look cameras in the market,” Liu said. “As a tiny start-up and targeting a niche market, Agfa Optima is the best choice for me.
“Compared to other big names, fewer people (especially younger generations) know about the Agfa Optima. So Rewindpix saluting the Agfa Optima will stand out immediately from peers’ models by the look,” he added.
“I love the large viewfinder of the Agfa Optima,” he said. “In my opinion, the current screen-free digital cameras share one major pain point: highly inaccurate tunnel effect simple viewfinder. They all provide inaccurate framing and distorted field of view. My logic: if the camera doesn’t have a LCD screen, then it deserves a better viewfinder for the users to see through.
“The Agfa Optima’s viewfinder fits my design, though it is so tough to find an optical supplier who is good at this large viewfinder manufacturing nowadays. Looks like Homo Sapiens went too far for high-tech and left the low-tech optical manufacturing behind. Luckily, I managed to find a supplier who can do it correctly.”
(Liu kindly provided some example images taken on the camera , which you can see below.)
Liu said he deliberately chose a manual film advance to move the Rewindpix camera further away from traditional digital models. “With the fast frame rate of modern digital cameras, we tend to forget the meaning of decisive moments in photography. With the winder, Rewindpix brings the users back to the flintlock era,” he said.
The exact date of the camera’s launch for crowdfunding on Kickstarter is yet to be finalised, but Liu said he hoped it will be in mid February.
In the meantime, you can check updates on the Rewindpix site.
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.
