The Hong Kong photographic brand Fotorgear has launched a digital camera with a decidedly niche analogue influence – an early SLR first launched in the 1950s.
The Campix camera, which launched this month on Kickstarter, is a small digital camera with interchangeable lenses heavily influenced by the East German Exakta Varex camera – right down to its waist-level prism.
Fotorgear said on its Kickstarter page: “Campix is a standalone digital camera built around waist-level composition and a film-inspired shooting ritual. It combines digital convenience with tactile details such as the physical film-advance dial and 36-shot roll workflow – no film is required.”
The camera can be purchased with a range of attachable lenses, which are:
- 8mm
- 16mm
- 60mm
- 75mm macro
- 1.55× anamorphic
Fotorgear had, at the time of writing, raised nearly £200,000 ($270,000) on the Kickstarter, which is due to run until 12 December. The basic model of the camera, which shoots both RAW and JPG images and comes with several “film” simulations, costs $109 (£80).
The Exakta Varex was a successful model started by East German camera company Ihagee after the pre-war Exakta brand was brought back to life after the end of World War II. The Campix camera shares the Varex’s curved body, though it is much smaller than the film model.
This is the not the first digital camera to be launched this year with such a strong link to a retro film model. In February, the Rewindpix – influenced by the Agfa Optima Sensor compacts of the 1970s and 80s – was launched by Xiao Liu. The camera ended up raising more than £1m during its Kickstarter campaign.
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.
