For the past several weeks, photographers have been expressing a recurring sentiment online: the lack of supply for highly sought-after cameras like the Fujifilm X100VI, Ricoh GR III, or Pentax 17 is actually a strategy to "build hype." That's absurd.
The launch of the Pentax 17, a brand-new half-frame film camera, has been hugely successful for Ricoh. So much so that the company has been forced to stop accepting orders for it as it scrambles to catch up to demand.
Since it is being produced by a company that already has a hard time keeping its GR III cameras in stock, it should come as no surprise then that pre-orders for the Pentax 17 have been far greater in number than anticipated and that there may be a significant wait to deliver them all.
Not only did we get a new enthusiast-level digital camera this week in the Z6 III, Pentax and Fujifilm both released new film cameras that very same day. The PetaPixel Podcast team is joined by Ted Forbes to discuss!
I’ve been in the camera review business for over 15 years and in that time I’ve been fortunate enough to have tested and taken photographs with countless cameras, spanning a wide variety of designs and intentions. Curiously, as I prepared to review the Pentax 17 it occurred to me that I had never once reviewed a new production 35mm film camera in all that time.
The brand-new film camera from Pentax that has been in development since 2022 is finally here. Called the Pentax 17 and teased last month, it is a half-frame, vertically oriented, fixed-lens camera that captures two 17mm x 24mm pictures within a single 35mm-format frame.