Film camera?

Right, no one is making them anymore. Or practically no one.

And certainly not Pentax, which has shifted its focus, so to speak, over to making nothing but cropped-sensor digital bodies and lenses.

But one of the great attractions of the Pentax system is, and has long been, all those lenses, going back practically to prehistoric times. And that is where I think Pentax is missing a bet.

First off, they need to design and manufacture a full-frame digital camera, one that embodies the Pentax philosophy of pleasing design, tight construction and a stripped down feature set. Practically every Pentax shooter dreams of such a camera, and I’ll leave that delicious fantasy for others to work out (at least for now).

What I would love to see is a new (gasp!) film camera from Pentax. A film camera for the new millennium.

What would it be? Ideally, a blend of the best features of Pentax’ two best cameras of the past, the LX and the MZ-S. It would be a basic, small, tough, weatherproof autofocus camera that would also play well with old manual-focus lenses. It would have a spacious, bright viewfinder, a moderate frame rate, and offer spot metering as well as mirror lockup. It could work, as did the MZ-S and current digital bodies, as a wireless flash controller for Pentax flashes. It might record or imprint EXIF data. And it would use the basic interface of the K20D, which derived from the PZ-1P, a camera that was in many ways ahead of its time (or, at least,  ahead of its market).

(In fact, in an essay that can be found on the web, Pentax designers explain their thinking behind the curious hybrid controls of the MZ-S, which tried to act like an old mechanical camera and so doesn’t work well with lenses that lack aperture rings. The public didn’t like the PZ-1P controls. Now, of course, such a design interface is standard.)

Anyway, I’d buy that camera in a heartbeat. So would, I suspect, a lot of other photographers who could use it for occasional pleasant forays into film even if that wasn’t their primary medium.

If the new film body was matched stylistically and functionally with a full frame digital body, so much the better.

Ned Bunnell, are you listening?