British large-format camera maker Intrepid Camera has unveiled a new 150mm large format lens which will launch later this year.
The lens has been designed by the team, in Brighton on England’s south coast, along with the help of a separate optical design team and is expected to be launched by the end of 2024 via a Kickstarter campaign.
The lens was announced on Intrepid Camera’s Instagram earlier this week as a series of stories, showing the lens’s glass construction and an electronic shutter, which the company has designed itself.
Intrepid Camera’s Maxim Grew gave Kosmo Foto more details about the lens.
“It is still in the early stages and I guess we are releasing information about it a little earlier than we normally would, but that is because we want feedback and ideas from the community and for them to be part of the project,” he said. “So expect the content around all of this to be a little more raw than usual!
“We started the project at the beginning of 2023 and the initial aim was to see if we could make a very simple starter lens and shutter using off-the-shelf parts, this can be done but the results you get just aren’t really worth the effort. However, we made some really good progress with the shutter and realised that we could make a new large format electronic shutter.
“We then contacted a lens design team and worked with them to come up with a new lens to go with our shutter, we decided on a 150mm focal length. After a few samples, we received the first beta model last month and have been testing it ever since.
“It’s a really fun and beautiful lens, but it still needs a bit of work. It has beautiful colour rendition, and when stopped down it has really nice contrast, wide open the depth of field is incredibly shallow so it’s great for portraits (it’s almost too shallow at f4.5 so we’ll work on that), it’s not quite sharp enough overall so we’ll work on that too.”
Test shots taken on the new lens can be seen in the images Intrepid Camera sent to us:
Grew said the lens is designed to complement other large-format lenses currently on the market.
“We are not trying to make a super clean and clinical large format lens, nor are we trying to make something with a lot of “character” like a LOMO lens, this is going to be something different, just as good for a creative portrait session as it is for sharp landscape work.
“We will be launching the lens and shutter on Kickstarter later this year and are aiming for a price of around £250 to £350 for the whole kit (lens and shutter),” Grew said.
Grew said the new lens will be constructed using Copal Sizes “so will be compatible with other lenses too.
“We are currently working on the design being compatible with both Copal 0 and 1 lenses,” he added.
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.
Too bad it uses an electronic shutter, there already are enough of them laying around from the late film era that are now useless without their dedicated control module or have electric defects.
Even if the Intrepid one is entirely self-contained, I’d trust a simple mechanical one much more in the long term.