There are some decent-ish new production models outside of the absurdly expensive Leicas- ones like the Lomo MC-A, the Pentax 17, and that new Rollei, but they’re wildly overpriced for what you get.
I suspect that manufacturers are waiting to see if film photography stays popular, or if it fades away over the next 5-10 years before they’re willing to design new cameras and/or spin up production lines and supply chains to build modern(i.e. late 90s style) film cameras.
You’re right, none of those are quite as toy like as I was implying. But I still am not really impressed with any of them. The Pentax seems to be the best actual camera, but it’s just half frame. Perhaps I’m just a film snob, but half frame 35 mm is just too much of a sacrifice in terms of negative size.
In any case, they’re all fairly basic point shoots with very small lenses. To my mind if you’re gonna go to all the extra trouble to shoot film, why go the route that doesn’t actually take advantage of film’s strengths?
I agree. As a great nerd, but not amazing photographer, I actually bought a Kodak Medalist II because I feel like it’s sort of ultimate film. 6x9 negatives, very good lens, fully manual. And it takes great photos 80 years on.
But I think the whole deal is that a lot of the people who are looking for analog as some sort of alternative to digital like the half-frame look. Hell, they’re selling new production 110 cameras and film, and they were never good in the first place.
Now you’re talking…
You must be right, I’ll just say I’m basing some of my initial reactions on the flood of posts I see on Reddit where somebody shows some really badly exposed, poorly scanned, over enlarged image and wonders why it doesn’t look like their favorite YouTuber/Instagrammer’s content.
I really think part of the problem is that scanning is almost universally terrible, or prohibitively expensive. I mean, my local film lab has the usual Noritsu, and while they do a great job with the colors, unless I get the super-duper, Cadillac style scans, it’s hard to tell scan noise from grain a lot of the time. And this is true at every film lab I’ve used- Darkoom, Brooktree, MPix, or the other local one.
I feel like a good actual enlargement print of a well shot negative would stun a lot of the analog aesthetic enthusiasts. Especially a medium format one.
Yeah, scanning is a problem for me and why I’m not shooting that much these days. I got spoiled, in that I used to have virtually unlimited access to a bank of Chromagraph S3400 drum scanners. The Noritsu and Frontier lab scans just don’t compare.
I have a list of current shops offering similar quality drum scans, but I have to REALLY like an image to drop 40, 50 bucks or more per piece.
To go back to this, because I believe it’s still on topic, have you had a CLA done on that Medalist? Or shutter speed testing?
Of my two, the one in the leather case has been off for a CLA and conversion to 120 film. It works amazingly well, but the shutter speeds are a little off. The highly respected guy that did the work said there’s not much that can be done about that because there are no real easy to find equivalents for the tired old springs inside the mechanism.
I haven’t, but it seems to be accurate enough that under/overexposure doesn’t seem to be an issue.
Im thinking about sending it to Dan Daniel in August for a CLA and maybe conversion to use 120. Not sure if I want to do that or not though.
Dan’s the best. He took a lot of time to walk me through how to rebond one of the prisms before I even sent him a camera. The camera that he worked on is so much nicer to use - it’s just smooooooth.
He was very nice in our emails. He’s not taking any new work until August at the earliest, so that’s most of why I didn’t already do it.
That was my experience as well, he’s got quite a backlog being one of a small handful of guys working on these in the US.
It’s been a long time since I picked up a camera. I mentioned that my hobbies come in spurts, and life has been intervening. My smallest camera case contains a Canon Canonet G-III QL17 (YouTube) and an Olympus 35RC. I really want to play with the Canon, but… I still have some B&W frames left in the A-1 from our trip down to Pacific Beach, WA, and some colour left in the Nikon FE. I need to finish those before I get the Canonet out. (I really should take the Canonet and the 35RC out together, and do a side-by-side comparison.)
Update (9/2026): Emailed Dan a week or two ago, and am on the calendar for November to get my Medalist II overhauled and converted to 120! I’ve got ten rolls of 120 respooled onto 620 that I’ve got to shoot beforehand… I’m going to have to think about how to best do that.
Also… my sons’ Scout troop is going to Seabase in the Florida Keys next summer, so I won some auctions for a Nikon Nikonos V dive camera and a couple of the underwater-specific lenses. I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve also bargain bought a small handful of weatherproof P&S cameras (Canon WP-1, Minolta Weathermatic Dual 35) and dive P&S (Sea & Sea MX-5 and MX-10) to play with. My concern is that if I’m on a boat for several days, recharging the digital P&S (OM System TG-7, good to 15m deep) may be a problem, but those film cameras will keep on chugging for several rolls of film before batteries are a problem. I’m thinking I’ll take the Nikonos and TG-7, and let the boys shoot the others.
I have one. Somewhere, I have a IV-F. Unfortunately, I got them just about the time I stopped diving. The V is in a Nikonos bag with the flash and other stuff.
Since I have to go to church on Sundays, I really need to make time for myself to take pictures on Saturdays.
I got a Minolta 450E Autopak today, like the one I had in high school. It might be interesting to shoot it next to the Yashica 124G for a 110-to-6x6 comparison. (In the '70s and '80s, 4x6 prints were all we asked for,)
I took some film to the lab today; so naturally, I’m reading about cameras. My favourite camera is the Olympus OM-1. I have an OM-1, an OM-1n, an OM-2, and an OM-4.
And then there’s the OM-3. It’s like a mechanical version of the OM-4, only without automatic exposure. What’s the point? If I want a manual camera, the OM-1 is perfect. If I want AE, then the OM-2n is great. If I want a bunch of bells and whistles, there’s the OM-4. The OM-3? Multiple metering modes, but no way to use them automatically. The OM-4 does everything the OM-3 does, and more. So again, what’s the point of the OM-3?
Unlike the OM-4, the OM-3 works across the full range of shutter speeds without batteries. But unlike the also-mechanical OM-1, the metering in the OM-3 is more sophisticated. Including spot metering and multi-spot metering as opposed to just center-weighted OM-1 CdS meter.
Yes, but does the sophisticated metering work without batteries? 
ISTM that the point of the OM-3 is supposed to be that you have the full range of shutter speeds in case your batteries die. Only without the batteries, you have an OM-1 that costs ten times as much.
In other news, I unearthed an Argus C4 I put some film in 20 years ago. The film’s still in it. Obviously expired. I’ll toss it and try a fresh roll eventually.