Driven by the ongoing rise of interest in film photography, in Summer 2024 camera manufacturer Ricoh launched the Pentax 17, its first new film camera in nearly two decades. Built for beginners, the $500 camera sits in the large middle ground between a fully adjustable SLR like the Nikon F100 and a point-and-shoot film camera like the Olympus Mju II. Like the latter, the Pentax 17 has an automatic shooting mode that handles focus and exposure without manual fine tuning. But the new camera also offers other manual modes that let you control for specific situations, as explained below.
Though unlike the vintage film cameras most modern hobbyists are used to, the Pentax 17 is a “half-frame” camera, meaning it captures 2x the frames on a standard roll of film—at half the resolution.
To determine whether this unique combination of features made the camera worth purchasing, I spent four months testing the Pentax 17. I used it in my nearly windowless ground floor Brooklyn apartment, took it along with me on bike rides around the city, and brought it on trips to Alabama, Vermont, Arkansas, and Michigan. Read on for my full hands-on review.
All images in this review were made on the Pentax 17, same for the images of the camera itself.
What Is a Half-Frame Camera?
A half-frame film camera captures two pictures within in a single 35mm format film frame, meaning for every roll of film, instead of the usual 36 frames (37 if you're lucky) you'll capture 72, give or take depending on film loading.
By exposing half of a single 35mm wide frame of film to light each time you hit its shutter button, you find up with frames that are 17mm x 24mm in dimension (hence the camera name). As a bonus, the vertically-oriented photos shot on a half-frame camera fit nicely on a phone screen. And though the 17 mm x 24 mm dimensions isn’t quite the 4 x 5 ratio now preferred by Instagram, it’s close enough.
The The Pentax 17 and all half-frame cameras use standard 35mm film, loaded the same say any other 35mm rangefinder or SLR is. However, getting twice as many images out of a roll than you do with say, an Olympus Stylus makes the growing costs of film a bit easier to swallow.
The author Daniel and his spaniel.
Ricoh Pentax 17: History & Release Date
Pentax has historically produced a number of fan favorite film cameras, including the super-simple K1000, a compact SLR that’s incredibly easy to use. Of course, that camera, like many of our other favorite film snappers, was first released in the mid-1970s and was discontinued before the turn of the millennium. If you want to buy one, you’ll have to roll the dice on a model from eBay, shell out for one that’s been vetted by your local camera store, or pray one of your grandparents had a secret past life as a hobbyist photog.
As the popularity of shooting film has grown over the last decade, Pentax (and its current parent company Ricoh) started to bet there was a market of potential photographers who would want a new film camera that offered the tactility of vintage options without going through the rigamarole of shopping secondhand. The easiest way into the market might have been to produce a camera like the Kodak Ektar H35, a $50 option with no further complications than a shutter on and off dial. Instead, the Ricoh and Pentax team spent a couple of years thinking about why people choose to shoot film and what intermediate photographers actually needed.
