I used to resent the very thought of half-frame cameras once I was a university pupil obsessive about medium and enormous format movie (which even desires Much less larger decision than 35mm?), however selecting to shoot at present is already a acutely aware determination to compromise high quality for the sake of expertise and elegance.
Who wants decision when you’ve gotten vibes? That's what Pentax appears to be saying with its new Pentax 17, a movie digicam that takes half-size pictures and appears about as timeless as an outdated geezer you signed up at some man's property sale. However the $499.95 Pentax 17 (out later this month) is a completely new digicam, one which, in 2024, takes the oh-so-hot 35mm format and shoots. smaller enjoyable footage and movie images price rather less.
Half-frame cameras should not a brand new thought. Olympus had a complete line devoted to creating these tiny photos again within the 60s, and Kodak now has one with the look, really feel, and have set of a single-use digicam the place you’ll be able to reload the movie.
The Pentax 17 handles issues the identical as its half-frame predecessors: as a substitute of capturing a 24 x 36mm horizontal picture on a 35mm roll, it creates a 17 x 24mm vertical picture, so that you get two photographs for every, making a roll of 36 publicity eke. he struck out a whopping 72 photographs. This protects you some cash, with the trade-off being smaller space of the picture captures much less high-quality element. (It additionally means you natively take portrait-oriented photographs, because the viewfinder is vertical and also you'll want to show the digicam sideways to take horizontal photographs.)
The Pentax 17 makes use of a built-in 25mm f/three.5 lens (equal to 37mm on a 35mm / full-frame digicam) with a nine-blade aperture. The lens doesn't have autofocus, but it surely's not fully guide both – use zone focus by selecting certainly one of six set distances, from zero.24 meters in macro mode to infinity. Relying solely on space focus means the Pentax 17 is greatest geared up for informal snapshots or slice-of-life genres equivalent to avenue images.
So far as publicity modes go, the 17 doesn't have full guide management right here both. It's designed principally to be used in program auto mode, but it surely has an publicity compensation dial, in addition to sluggish and flash modes, so extra expert photographers can at the least have some artistic management.
This digicam has no options you'd even discover in a 48-year-old Pentax Ok1000 you should purchase on eBay for about $100, because it doesn't have interchangeable lenses or full management over settings like focus and publicity. However nonetheless, it provides a novel expertise (in addition to a brand new guarantee and first repairs). That is the primary digicam from Pentax's movie mission that it introduced again in 2022, when it got down to make a brand new movie digicam with suggestions from its group. Whereas it will have been a safer guess to remake the fan-favorite Ok1000 or the extremely coveted Pentax 67 and its pretty picket grip, I give Pentax props for taking an opportunity on one thing a bit totally different.