Pentax’s New Film Camera Will Have a Fixed, Non-Interchangeable Lens
Last December, Pentax announced that it was developing a new film camera in response to the resurgent popularity of the medium. In its most recent update, the company has revealed more about what that camera will look like, including the fact it will have a fixed lens.
In a film camera update published to its YouTube channel, Takeo Suzuki — a member of the product planning and design team at Ricoh — shared that the upcoming new film camera that is currently in development will not be a successor to the LX or the Pentax 67 series, but rather a compact camera with a fixed lens.
“The cameras that Ricoh is currently working on are compact cameras with fixed lenses that cannot be replaced. It will be a very important model only for the first film camera in this project,” Suzuki says. “Although there are some parts that have been reused, we are considering almost completely new ones.”
The company says that it wants to develop a camera that “young users can enjoy” and to create a film camera that is designed around the idea of fun and easily transportable.
Additionally, Ricoh earlier this year said that it desired use a hand-winding mechanism in its upcoming camera and Suzuki says the company remains set in that goal.
“It will be a compact camera with an SLR-type, hand wound mechanism,” Suzuki says. “This gives us the possibility of installing the same mechanism in an SLR camera body when we decide to produce a film-format SLR in the future.”
On that note, Suzuki adds that the development of this first compact film camera will serve as a baseline for what it will develop going forward. It sounds as though Ricoh remains, at least right now, dedicated to producing more than one new film camera.
Suzuki says that Ricoh still has several factors to work through before it completes the design, but is working with film shop owners, photographers, and those who follow the brand on social media to determine the final shape of the compact film camera.
“The goal of this project is not only to produce a new camera, but to create a solid environment in which those that witnesses this project and those who love film photography can more freely express their ideas, opinions, and hopes,” Suzuki says. “We would like to play a supporting role to help realize this future.
