CORRECTIONS The Contarex and Adox cameras from the 60s had interchangeable backs. I should've said the combination of an interchangeable lens mount and film back had never been done in a 35mm body before.
Rolleiflex SL2000F and 3003 are SLR cameras with 35 film format backs, dual viewfinders, and a full range of lenses with focal lengths from 14 mm to 1000 mm.
Small thing, you talk about there not being film SLRs for 20-25 years, but the Nikon F6 came out in 2004, and was still being made new when this project launched, in fact it didn’t end production until 2020.
Nikon retained some models of film camera in production until just a few years back (pretty much until the moment where Copal ceased production of manual cocking shutter unit), but really mid 2000s were the time that film starts to die.
I knew about the "Reflex"; but it was not interesting. Get an old Canon, Olympus, Nikon, Leica R, Minolta, Pentax! Cheap & Solid. * The "really Bad thing" about Kickstarters: if anything fails, you cannot make the company pay. The company are you!
R&D on a camera is not a trivial task. As an example, the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV has 27 optical elements, 720 mechanical parts, 1,751 electrical parts and 42 circuit boards. The total part count (including 366 screws and washers), is almost 3,000 parts.
Most people really understand the difficulties of mechanical and optical design and thought it would be as easy as programming and prototyping some electronics. There's NO WAY they can make their own shutter unit because after the 90s the shutter mechanism has become so complicated that most camera manufacturer themselves relies on specialized company to make them (Copal and Seiko).
Right at the beginning when introducing the team - a guy who "knows about photography." A Formula 1 guy. The one thing missing was someone with experience in manufacturing cameras. This was like Lytro. They knew nothing about what photographers really want in a camera, so they tried to build a camera that didn't do what most photographers really wanted. So they went broke trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The reflex idea appeals perhaps to people who are Instagram warriors, but anyone with a lot of experience with cameras knows that rather than changing the front half of the mirror compartment, it is far simpler to just use adapters for lenses that have a longer flange distance than you are using. This is not a new idea. Bronica built their business in the 1960's by making a camera that was ideal for hacking third party lenses onto. Their idea was to make a helicoid which could then focus almost any 6x6 lens put in front of it. Numerous manufacturers made lenses that would easily work, especially Nikon, buit there grew a backyard industry of hacking lenses never mean for the system. It was popular, but Bronica in the 1970's changed to a system that worked with their own lenses and needed leaf shutters, so no longer easy to hack. However it did mean cameras could be smaller and lighter, and it turned out that photographers liked that even more than hacking lenses. Anyone with a lot of experience with adapters is familiar with the limitations that come with using adapted glass. However, it is often worth it, BUT I would rather carry around smaller adapters than a large front of the mirror box. It is an impractical idea that was always going to be a manufacturing nightmare, which the team would have known if they had come from a camera manufacturing background. And it is doubtful that more than a small portion of photographers really want that.
@@ZainRizaThe point is he had never developed a camera. None of these people had. Being an engineer is not a generically applicable skill, the learning curve would be enormous given their backgrounds and essentially learning on the fly means dozens of expensive prototypes and revisions burning capital. As soon as you detailed the dream team I knew where this was going. I'm an engineer myself, I would never assume that my skills would transfer over to something like rockets or cars. Top engineers in an industry spend a lifetime getting there. Even packaging is an engineering challenge and I've met people with top degrees just in packaging engineering. It wasn't COVID, it was a team severely lacking in relevant skills and expertise that did them in.
Even Canon and Nikon will have a hard time for this because all the machinaries and supply chain has gone and they'll be difficult to restore. Leica could retain film camera production because Leica doesn't rely much on third party to make film M cameras and they're all handmade.
@@GrainOnTheGo actually, my argument is mostly what Pentax themselves have said in an interview, and this is also why they'd start with rather simple point and shoot instead of straight up full fledged SLR for their film camera project. Surely Nikon may do so, but whether it is worth the the time and effort is questionable given that they are in a much better situation than Pentax. And for Canon I'd say there's absolutely no possibility they're gonna do it.
@@mengziyue4574 Nikon still has the talent in house, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to buy the machining. MiNT is doing a Rollei licensed AF 35mm soon, and Pentax is scaling up from bottoms up. If Pentax and MiNT sell I’m 90% positive Nikon will at minimum consider a Nikon S anniversary edition.
credit to them for trying.. it probably takes an established manufacturer to take on something as complex as a camera. Pentax is currently working on bringing back a film camera, will be interesting.
The Pentax film camera, will it be half-frame? Anyway, this developement takes far too long. What did they do? Burn all technical drawings from former years?
@@ZainRizaFatuous and unnecessarily aggressive response. It's entirely foreseeable that a small company trying to create an ultra-niche product that competes in its small target market with dirt cheap second-hand manual SLR bodies would fail. If I have a burning desire to experiment with vintage Olympus lenses, I can get an OM1 body for peanuts. Searching online for a Helios 44 lens suggests that you can get one with a Zenit or Practika body effectively thrown in for free. There are currently Canon, Nikon and Contax SLRs from the 1980s for sale within half an hour of me for about £150 for a body and 2-3 lenses. As to Covid, well actually the people who know about these things (bodies like the World Health Organization) have had a global viral pandemic on the list of likely threats to global health for years, along with things like antimicrobial resistance, climate change and water security.
After I backed the yashica Y35 and got that terrible disappointment of a cheap toy camera, never ever baked anything again. So when I saw this project I knew it would fail. It's sad, the Idea was really interesting, but anyone with some perspective or experience shipping products would know how much effort and budget you need to achieve success. Great dive in!
Yashica doesn’t exist as a brand anymore, same thing as Rollei. Whenever you see products under those two names it’s almost always just being licensed out by a Chinese factory. The only on that looks ok is the upcoming Rollei Mint 35AF, but even that is questionable.
I've had plenty of success with Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects. It's just a roll of dice whether or not you get what you backed. I've only had one disastrous kickstarter project: the flowmotion one. That was a rollercoaster.
Saying that film has "pathetic" low light performance is really disingenuous. You can get brilliant results up to ISO 3200 with certain films, and even very usable negatives up to 6400 with some. That's the same ISO as my Fuji X-T1's normal range maximum. And even though I'm a street photographer who loves to shoot at night I've never wished for more, honestly. Is digital low light, ISO performance - especially in brand new camera models - better than analog? Sure. Everything else wouldn't make sense anyway. But does that, in comparison, make film automatically, "pathetic"?? Fuck, no!
A very well made video. Thanks! I was excited about this camera project until I thought for a little while. The removable film back sounds a good idea but it never took off back in the late 50s with the likes of the Mamiya 'Magazine' that were designed for the amateur market. As for the removable lens mounts that seems a much neater but much more expensive solution to using lens adapters but I suggest it would not be something you'd want to do in the field. As for the shutter debacle others have commented about this. I'll just add that even back in The 60s Nikon themselves used shutter assemblies made by Copal rather than develop their own. So what really went wrong? I think the engineering challenges were just the nail in the coffin. The real problem was the actual concept.against the likely enduser cost. The alternative to a Reflex at say $750 could be three very decent camera bodies and have a Canon a Nikon and a Pentax if you fancied it. You could buy proven designs that have already lasted many decades. Even if one body has a problem there are still two others to use. And so on.... Your own comment sums it up nicely. You so wanted this camera to succeed but you never hand any intention of buying one,
It's already a red flag if you expect to fund your business solely from crowd funding. Especially with bulk manufacturing. It's just not possible to grow as quickly as they expected. They should've started with hand built, 3D printed working cameras. (something like a well built consumer ready prototype)
I should've stated in the video but it's not clear whether or not the crowdfunding was the sole source of funding. So there may have other sources of funding. I could only find any other sources of funding.
@@ZainRiza Zeiss Contarex/Contaflex,(1950s -60s) Rolleiflex SL2000/3000/3300 (1908s) to name a few. Very rare these days, and stupidly expensive in their time (the Rollieflex models had both waist-and eye-level finders built into the body), but you can google them.
That $100,000 is only enough for marketing to get more fund. Fans are blinded by such big dream and if this project had such a good R&D to develop, it will be such costly and have to sell lots of units.
I knew this project was doomed from the very beginning. To be honest if you double that price to 700 pounds, or even triple of that to 1,050, I would still call it undoable. It is absurd for me to see how ignorant and inexperienced the team was when it comes to R&D and manufacturing. Developing a camera like this would cost millions nowadays.
I think the prices of NONS cameras is a great example of how much it would have been for REFLEX. Remember NONS are designed for Instax films which requires less parts then the 35mm counterpart. Plsu NONS cameras only have a 1/250s max shutter so imagine how much a 1/4000s one would cost.
This sad story proves that it’s almost impossible to bring to market a product needing many months/years of development without having an adequate cash flow from another source such as another product or backing from another business with large R&D funding. Polaroids SX70 project is estimated to have cost about a billion dollars and was financed from existing products and other investments. If they could have gotten a Nikon/Canon/Pentax/Fuji type company to partner with then maybe just maybe it could have been successful although there is a reason why these company’s no longer are interested if making advanced film cameras anymore.
Thanks for a very interesting video. There are many parallels here with people who try to launch a new car brand with an inadequate budget and into a market which does not really exist. Too much to do with obsession and not enough about market research. By the way, as soon as I saw a picture of camera, I noticed that it uses the same lens as my 55 year old Yashica J35 and that the shutter button looks like it was copied from my 50 year old Fujica GL690 6 x 9 cm rollfilm camera! Speaking of the latter, that was maybe the type of camera they should have aimed for. Serviceable used 35mm film cameras are abundant, affordable and are compact and convenient to use but you only get the equivalent of 4 megapixels resolution. With 6 x 9, the resolution is equivalent to 22 megapixels so the image quality is up to modern digital standards, as I can testify from using the Fujica GL690. Therefore, a new 6 x 9 format camera might have found a market with professional photographers who are asked to shoot events, such as weddings, partly on film but do not want to disappoint their clients with grainy prints. That is still rather niche, though, so probably not an investment opportunity to be recommended.
Interesting, however there was a 35mm camera developed by Olympus that had interchangeable film backs, have a look at the Olympus OM--X, which was supposed to be the OM-1.
Pre mirrorless canon mount was the one you could stick anything on , except rf lenses. Curious what the changeable back was about, when they started with 35. Diana cameras did the changeable back thing ,60x60 35 and instax mini. Wish holga did a instax back
Manufacturing is hard. It’s arrogant to think conducting a Kick Starter and having a good idea is enough to bring any product to the finish line. Apple spent years and billions to produce an EV and even they failed.
A little confused when you keep talking about "this camera has, can...connect to their app.." when it never lived up to their hype. But thanks for this video, I didn't know about it. Now I am fearful for the Pentax film camera project that I am eagerly awaiting to release their first camera LOL
This wasn't a camera, but a mess of a kickstarter program that should have never been funded. It was an unobtainable goal to have interchangable lens mounts.
@@ZainRiza Ofcourse it is, but it's also way too easy to be overly ambitious. The people working on the camera weren't stupid, but they probably weren't prepared for the immense complexity of it all. It probably would have been easier to get a regular camera out of the door and get a steady supply of money before trying something so complex as a modular anything
@@EddoWagt that’s exactly what the market needed at this point actually. The only company that is left now producing film cameras is Leica and that’s for an incredibly niche market of people who can even spare the money for a Leica M even if they can afford one (like myself who could afford one). Canon, Olympus and Nikon all left the market in the 2010s and I don’t blame them, there wasn’t much of a market for it and rust is a supply and demand argument. Pentax looks like they will offer something but even…. A Pentax K1000 would not really be enough. It would have to be something at least along the lines of an LX to remotely entice me with a 1/2000 shutter and in all rights my preference would be to have some kind of autofocus system. I’m not sure Pentax is the company to deliver that, if would be more of a Nikon or Canon thing but they haven’t talked about film being viable at either company since at least 2015.
Brilliant engineering, unique concept but a lack of understanding of the process and cost of going from prototype to production. It also seems that the marketing was somewhat lacking with the advances in technology meaning that the time of the proposed release coincided with the start of the mirrorless boom and demise of the consumer DSLR.
Really interesting vid mate! Never really heard of this before…I guess the timing just didn’t work out for them. What new film cameras have come out recently? I guess the lomo/disposable stuff (too plastic), Leica M6 and… that’s it? I think there is a gap in the market now for a premium priced one that’s not a Leica price - people are spending big money on things like contax, gotta be enough margin in there for someone.
@@ZainRiza Pentax are relasing a half frame 35mm camera this summer and have said they are working on another compact and 2x SLR style cameras which we should know more about later this year! Enjoyed the vid, never heard anything about this but seems like they have some solid ideas. Would have been a cool camera!
Thanks for this. Im a backer. It’s not the only KS project I backed that failed to deliver, but it was the most expensive. I somehow think they could have delivered something, maybe a pinhole camera at least, haha! The commenters here have convinced me I was too optimistic.
Why bother making such a camera when you can get a wonderful one for a few bucks ? I've got four Nikon SLR (2 F2, 1 FE and a Nikormat), they're heavily built, they will last for many, many years, and they all share stunning lenses.
sure but they're old and they don't make spare parts for the old cameras anymore. This camera was supposed to offer a bunch of functionality that legacy SLRs don't.
@@ZainRizaThe only thing you need with a film camera is a shutter, a diaphragm and a meter. Let all the "functionalities" to DSLR. I've got many DSLRs and I don't use half of what they can do. Yes, these are old cameras, I've got some older than these (Leica, Rolleiflex, etc.), some of them pre-WW2, they all work fine, take amazing pictures and there is no reason they will stop doing so, if nicely used. And, if necessary they still can be repaired, I know some people who have big stocks of spare parts or not functional models that can be used for that. Well, it may be a good idea to build a new body, not now, but later. So keep your blueprints..
@@ZainRiza rewatched again though and it was a very good video, such a shame about the camera as it seems like an awesome idea to have the contarex style changeable backs and a changeable mounting plate for lenses like large format!
@@rayce not only that, you need to have customers for that, like, a lot of them. and half frame is perfect for the young people as they are going to post this photos on social media anyway where most photos are in portrait format. They are main target audience for this camera. I think Pentax did a good research on this, and if this succeed, we might see even an SLR camera.
@@SomeUnremarkableGuy there's a reason film prices are high. the market is already here. making another half frame camera isn't adding to anything. besides labs out here are charging more money for half frame rolls. an extra $10.
What so Ricoh/Pentax can go bankrupt too? The market for a brand new premium, sophisticated SLR these days is tiny. The market that will pay for what such a camera would cost to build these days is even smaller. While there’s still millions of perfectly excellent SLRs available for a fraction of their new price.
whoa that's so weird. If you hover over the watermark in the bottom right of the video, you'll get a prompt to subscribe. It may also be the browser that you’re on. Try using chrome. Thanks for pointing this out to me!
Awesome vid. I think the problem was management. Project management and creative, are almost poles apart. And when u have somebody that can jiggle the extremes , is when u have those miracle products that nobody saw possible. Thank u again
A great interview that will great to see, is Gary ho from mint camera, and his new rollei35af . And obviously Tko from pentax film project . Thx u that was a great conclusion of a beautiful history that never was...
On an unrelated note, you may want to work on enunciation, you sound tipsy. Unless this video is sponsored by Heineken, than all good. And please don't take this as a dig. It's just friendly constructive input since other than that it's a nice video!
![เปิดบ้าน พี่ตูน Bodyslam หลังใหม่คนแรก ที่ภูเก็ต l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/flFwcmyDQSk/mqdefault.jpg)
CORRECTIONS The Contarex and Adox cameras from the 60s had interchangeable backs.
I should've said the combination of an interchangeable lens mount and film back had never been done in a 35mm body before.
Rolleiflex SL2000F and 3003 are SLR cameras with 35 film format backs, dual viewfinders, and a full range of lenses with focal lengths from 14 mm to 1000 mm.
Miranda cameras from the 70's had the ability to adapt to 8 different lens systems including L39s, Nikons, Contaxes, Practicas and others also loll.
@@loochan325Is what I was thinking....th-cam.com/video/2tTfG95ujBI/w-d-xo.html
Small thing, you talk about there not being film SLRs for 20-25 years, but the Nikon F6 came out in 2004, and was still being made new when this project launched, in fact it didn’t end production until 2020.
potato potahtoe...but yes you are right.
Nikon retained some models of film camera in production until just a few years back (pretty much until the moment where Copal ceased production of manual cocking shutter unit), but really mid 2000s were the time that film starts to die.
and not to forget the Leica R9 from 2002-2009
I knew about the "Reflex"; but it was not interesting. Get an old Canon, Olympus, Nikon, Leica R, Minolta, Pentax! Cheap & Solid.
*
The "really Bad thing" about Kickstarters: if anything fails, you cannot make the company pay. The company are you!
that is the risk you take that most KS backers don't understand.
R&D on a camera is not a trivial task. As an example, the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV has 27 optical elements, 720 mechanical parts, 1,751 electrical parts and 42 circuit boards. The total part count (including 366 screws and washers), is almost 3,000 parts.
Most people really understand the difficulties of mechanical and optical design and thought it would be as easy as programming and prototyping some electronics. There's NO WAY they can make their own shutter unit because after the 90s the shutter mechanism has become so complicated that most camera manufacturer themselves relies on specialized company to make them (Copal and Seiko).
How many circuit boards?
@@mengziyue4574Since the '60s snd early '70s camera manufacturers used Seiko-Copal shutters.
And it's one Carrington Event from becoming a massively expensive paperweight.
Right at the beginning when introducing the team - a guy who "knows about photography." A Formula 1 guy. The one thing missing was someone with experience in manufacturing cameras. This was like Lytro. They knew nothing about what photographers really want in a camera, so they tried to build a camera that didn't do what most photographers really wanted. So they went broke trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.
The reflex idea appeals perhaps to people who are Instagram warriors, but anyone with a lot of experience with cameras knows that rather than changing the front half of the mirror compartment, it is far simpler to just use adapters for lenses that have a longer flange distance than you are using.
This is not a new idea. Bronica built their business in the 1960's by making a camera that was ideal for hacking third party lenses onto. Their idea was to make a helicoid which could then focus almost any 6x6 lens put in front of it. Numerous manufacturers made lenses that would easily work, especially Nikon, buit there grew a backyard industry of hacking lenses never mean for the system. It was popular, but Bronica in the 1970's changed to a system that worked with their own lenses and needed leaf shutters, so no longer easy to hack. However it did mean cameras could be smaller and lighter, and it turned out that photographers liked that even more than hacking lenses.
Anyone with a lot of experience with adapters is familiar with the limitations that come with using adapted glass. However, it is often worth it, BUT I would rather carry around smaller adapters than a large front of the mirror box. It is an impractical idea that was always going to be a manufacturing nightmare, which the team would have known if they had come from a camera manufacturing background. And it is doubtful that more than a small portion of photographers really want that.
I should've elaborated on the founder's position. He wasn't just knowledgeable about photography but he was one of the lead designers.
@@ZainRizaThe point is he had never developed a camera. None of these people had. Being an engineer is not a generically applicable skill, the learning curve would be enormous given their backgrounds and essentially learning on the fly means dozens of expensive prototypes and revisions burning capital. As soon as you detailed the dream team I knew where this was going. I'm an engineer myself, I would never assume that my skills would transfer over to something like rockets or cars. Top engineers in an industry spend a lifetime getting there. Even packaging is an engineering challenge and I've met people with top degrees just in packaging engineering.
It wasn't COVID, it was a team severely lacking in relevant skills and expertise that did them in.
4:54 WRONG! The Zeiss Contarex and Adox 35mm cameras both had interchangeable backs way back in the 1950’s and 60’s.
thanks for this comment. I've made a correction and clarification in the description.
This is just example of the ridiculous costs of development and engineering. Only a major manufacturer could ever pull this off.
Well not necessarily. I think it was a case of bad luck and bad planning.
Even Canon and Nikon will have a hard time for this because all the machinaries and supply chain has gone and they'll be difficult to restore. Leica could retain film camera production because Leica doesn't rely much on third party to make film M cameras and they're all handmade.
@@mengziyue4574 if Pentax is doing it, then Canon and Nikon with infinitely higher income are more than capable of doing it.
@@GrainOnTheGo actually, my argument is mostly what Pentax themselves have said in an interview, and this is also why they'd start with rather simple point and shoot instead of straight up full fledged SLR for their film camera project. Surely Nikon may do so, but whether it is worth the the time and effort is questionable given that they are in a much better situation than Pentax. And for Canon I'd say there's absolutely no possibility they're gonna do it.
@@mengziyue4574 Nikon still has the talent in house, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to buy the machining. MiNT is doing a Rollei licensed AF 35mm soon, and Pentax is scaling up from bottoms up. If Pentax and MiNT sell I’m 90% positive Nikon will at minimum consider a Nikon S anniversary edition.
Still not convincing for me, Working older film cameras are so plentiful, still, Cheap film is need it much more. Just my opinion
they weren't trying to be an old film camera.
credit to them for trying.. it probably takes an established manufacturer to take on something as complex as a camera. Pentax is currently working on bringing back a film camera, will be interesting.
I'm looking forward to it regardless of what they produce and yes I think it's very commendable that they tried in the first place.
The Pentax film camera, will it be half-frame? Anyway, this developement takes far too long. What did they do? Burn all technical drawings from former years?
"Nobody could have foreseen...".
I beg to differ.
why didn't you stop COVID???
@@ZainRizaFatuous and unnecessarily aggressive response. It's entirely foreseeable that a small company trying to create an ultra-niche product that competes in its small target market with dirt cheap second-hand manual SLR bodies would fail. If I have a burning desire to experiment with vintage Olympus lenses, I can get an OM1 body for peanuts. Searching online for a Helios 44 lens suggests that you can get one with a Zenit or Practika body effectively thrown in for free. There are currently Canon, Nikon and Contax SLRs from the 1980s for sale within half an hour of me for about £150 for a body and 2-3 lenses.
As to Covid, well actually the people who know about these things (bodies like the World Health Organization) have had a global viral pandemic on the list of likely threats to global health for years, along with things like antimicrobial resistance, climate change and water security.
After I backed the yashica Y35 and got that terrible disappointment of a cheap toy camera, never ever baked anything again. So when I saw this project I knew it would fail. It's sad, the Idea was really interesting, but anyone with some perspective or experience shipping products would know how much effort and budget you need to achieve success. Great dive in!
Yashica doesn’t exist as a brand anymore, same thing as Rollei. Whenever you see products under those two names it’s almost always just being licensed out by a Chinese factory. The only on that looks ok is the upcoming Rollei Mint 35AF, but even that is questionable.
I've had plenty of success with Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects. It's just a roll of dice whether or not you get what you backed. I've only had one disastrous kickstarter project: the flowmotion one. That was a rollercoaster.
I was SO excited for this camera, Pretty much the only product I've ever seriously considered backing on KS.
it had so much promise.
Saying that film has "pathetic" low light performance is really disingenuous. You can get brilliant results up to ISO 3200 with certain films, and even very usable negatives up to 6400 with some. That's the same ISO as my Fuji X-T1's normal range maximum. And even though I'm a street photographer who loves to shoot at night I've never wished for more, honestly.
Is digital low light, ISO performance - especially in brand new camera models - better than analog? Sure. Everything else wouldn't make sense anyway. But does that, in comparison, make film automatically, "pathetic"?? Fuck, no!
ok make a video about it
A very well made video. Thanks!
I was excited about this camera project until I thought for a little while. The removable film back sounds a good idea but it never took off back in the late 50s with the likes of the Mamiya 'Magazine' that were designed for the amateur market. As for the removable lens mounts that seems a much neater but much more expensive solution to using lens adapters but I suggest it would not be something you'd want to do in the field.
As for the shutter debacle others have commented about this. I'll just add that even back in The 60s Nikon themselves used shutter assemblies made by Copal rather than develop their own.
So what really went wrong? I think the engineering challenges were just the nail in the coffin. The real problem was the actual concept.against the likely enduser cost. The alternative to a Reflex at say $750 could be three very decent camera bodies and have a Canon a Nikon and a Pentax if you fancied it. You could buy proven designs that have already lasted many decades. Even if one body has a problem there are still two others to use. And so on....
Your own comment sums it up nicely. You so wanted this camera to succeed but you never hand any intention of buying one,
It's already a red flag if you expect to fund your business solely from crowd funding. Especially with bulk manufacturing. It's just not possible to grow as quickly as they expected. They should've started with hand built, 3D printed working cameras. (something like a well built consumer ready prototype)
I should've stated in the video but it's not clear whether or not the crowdfunding was the sole source of funding. So there may have other sources of funding. I could only find any other sources of funding.
Interchangeable backs in 35mm aren't new, but they ARE rare. The interchangeable lens mount was unique, and a fantastic idea.
oh really?
@@ZainRiza Zeiss Contarex/Contaflex,(1950s -60s) Rolleiflex SL2000/3000/3300 (1908s) to name a few. Very rare these days, and stupidly expensive in their time (the Rollieflex models had both waist-and eye-level finders built into the body), but you can google them.
Leica R8 and R9 film 35mm camera had digital back. These are very hard to buy nowadays.
@@shang-hsienyang1284 True, but this was a film/digital exchange, and it didn't allow changing of film in mid-roll.
@@andrewcomerford9411Rollei SL2000F and 3003 have this, and dual viewfinder, and lenses from 14 to 1000mm, but sure just one type of mount.
That $100,000 is only enough for marketing to get more fund. Fans are blinded by such big dream and if this project had such a good R&D to develop, it will be such costly and have to sell lots of units.
I don't agree. Plenty of successful products spend next to nothing on marketing.
Great job hitting this topic in longer form.
thank you Kevin!
Reminds me of the technically innovative 1960s Topcon RE Super 35mm SLR. I think the REFLEX designer must have admired the Topcon.
good chance he did
They were very naïve. Drawing pictures of groovy cameras on autocad and making dummy models of cameras isn't being a camera manufacturer.
pretty sure they had working prototypes
I knew this project was doomed from the very beginning. To be honest if you double that price to 700 pounds, or even triple of that to 1,050, I would still call it undoable. It is absurd for me to see how ignorant and inexperienced the team was when it comes to R&D and manufacturing. Developing a camera like this would cost millions nowadays.
I think the prices of NONS cameras is a great example of how much it would have been for REFLEX. Remember NONS are designed for Instax films which requires less parts then the 35mm counterpart. Plsu NONS cameras only have a 1/250s max shutter so imagine how much a 1/4000s one would cost.
ooh that's interesting.
This sad story proves that it’s almost impossible to bring to market a product needing many months/years of development without having an adequate cash flow from another source such as another product or backing from another business with large R&D funding. Polaroids SX70 project is estimated to have cost about a billion dollars and was financed from existing products and other investments. If they could have gotten a Nikon/Canon/Pentax/Fuji type company to partner with then maybe just maybe it could have been successful although there is a reason why these company’s no longer are interested if making advanced film cameras anymore.
I hope to see the team come back.
Thanks for a very interesting video. There are many parallels here with people who try to launch a new car brand with an inadequate budget and into a market which does not really exist. Too much to do with obsession and not enough about market research. By the way, as soon as I saw a picture of camera, I noticed that it uses the same lens as my 55 year old Yashica J35 and that the shutter button looks like it was copied from my 50 year old Fujica GL690 6 x 9 cm rollfilm camera! Speaking of the latter, that was maybe the type of camera they should have aimed for. Serviceable used 35mm film cameras are abundant, affordable and are compact and convenient to use but you only get the equivalent of 4 megapixels resolution. With 6 x 9, the resolution is equivalent to 22 megapixels so the image quality is up to modern digital standards, as I can testify from using the Fujica GL690. Therefore, a new 6 x 9 format camera might have found a market with professional photographers who are asked to shoot events, such as weddings, partly on film but do not want to disappoint their clients with grainy prints. That is still rather niche, though, so probably not an investment opportunity to be recommended.
The Rolleiflex SL2000F also provided the possibility to change the filmback.
Interesting, however there was a 35mm camera developed by Olympus that had interchangeable film backs, have a look at the Olympus OM--X, which was supposed to be the OM-1.
from what I'm seeing it was a prototype that never got made.
@@ZainRiza They went with the OM1, pity they didn't release it. It was a thing of beauty, which is more than you can say for the Reflex
Pre mirrorless canon mount was the one you could stick anything on , except rf lenses.
Curious what the changeable back was about, when they started with 35. Diana cameras did the changeable back thing ,60x60 35 and instax mini. Wish holga did a instax back
What a great video, great story telling and pacing. I loved the intro too. Well done.
appreciate you a lot!
Manufacturing is hard. It’s arrogant to think conducting a Kick Starter and having a good idea is enough to bring any product to the finish line. Apple spent years and billions to produce an EV and even they failed.
Maybe Pentax has hired one or two employees to forward their film-camera project. That would be great.
A little confused when you keep talking about "this camera has, can...connect to their app.." when it never lived up to their hype. But thanks for this video, I didn't know about it. Now I am fearful for the Pentax film camera project that I am eagerly awaiting to release their first camera LOL
yup a lot of broken promises. I think the Pentax camera will be fine. They have a bit more experience haha
This wasn't a camera, but a mess of a kickstarter program that should have never been funded. It was an unobtainable goal to have interchangable lens mounts.
easy to say with hindsight.
@@ZainRizaI never believed it would get off the ground from the beginning.
@@ZainRiza Ofcourse it is, but it's also way too easy to be overly ambitious. The people working on the camera weren't stupid, but they probably weren't prepared for the immense complexity of it all. It probably would have been easier to get a regular camera out of the door and get a steady supply of money before trying something so complex as a modular anything
@@EddoWagt that’s exactly what the market needed at this point actually.
The only company that is left now producing film cameras is Leica and that’s for an incredibly niche market of people who can even spare the money for a Leica M even if they can afford one (like myself who could afford one).
Canon, Olympus and Nikon all left the market in the 2010s and I don’t blame them, there wasn’t much of a market for it and rust is a supply and demand argument.
Pentax looks like they will offer something but even…. A Pentax K1000 would not really be enough. It would have to be something at least along the lines of an LX to remotely entice me with a 1/2000 shutter and in all rights my preference would be to have some kind of autofocus system.
I’m not sure Pentax is the company to deliver that, if would be more of a Nikon or Canon thing but they haven’t talked about film being viable at either company since at least 2015.
@HunterBarnerthat would be another nice camera to rerelease in film.
Brilliant engineering, unique concept but a lack of understanding of the process and cost of going from prototype to production. It also seems that the marketing was somewhat lacking with the advances in technology meaning that the time of the proposed release coincided with the start of the mirrorless boom and demise of the consumer DSLR.
I think it was a combo of bad luck and bad management. Not necessarily a lack of knowledge.
Great informative piece, would like to see more indepth commentary videod like this one.
More to come!
Really interesting vid mate! Never really heard of this before…I guess the timing just didn’t work out for them. What new film cameras have come out recently? I guess the lomo/disposable stuff (too plastic), Leica M6 and… that’s it? I think there is a gap in the market now for a premium priced one that’s not a Leica price - people are spending big money on things like contax, gotta be enough margin in there for someone.
Thank you dude! Yeah man just seems like a big opportunity for some company out there.
@@ZainRiza Pentax are relasing a half frame 35mm camera this summer and have said they are working on another compact and 2x SLR style cameras which we should know more about later this year!
Enjoyed the vid, never heard anything about this but seems like they have some solid ideas. Would have been a cool camera!
Thanks for this. Im a backer. It’s not the only KS project I backed that failed to deliver, but it was the most expensive. I somehow think they could have delivered something, maybe a pinhole camera at least, haha! The commenters here have convinced me I was too optimistic.
It's a real shame backers came away with nothing!
Your X100V can use that continuous LED for AF purposes - AF Illuminator in the settings. Maybe you turned it off to avoid distracting subjects?
Say whaaat?
Oh I’ve forgotten about this camera 🙈
hehe
Why bother making such a camera when you can get a wonderful one for a few bucks ? I've got four Nikon SLR (2 F2, 1 FE and a Nikormat), they're heavily built, they will last for many, many years, and they all share stunning lenses.
sure but they're old and they don't make spare parts for the old cameras anymore. This camera was supposed to offer a bunch of functionality that legacy SLRs don't.
@@ZainRizaThe only thing you need with a film camera is a shutter, a diaphragm and a meter. Let all the "functionalities" to DSLR. I've got many DSLRs and I don't use half of what they can do.
Yes, these are old cameras, I've got some older than these (Leica, Rolleiflex, etc.), some of them pre-WW2, they all work fine, take amazing pictures and there is no reason they will stop doing so, if nicely used. And, if necessary they still can be repaired, I know some people who have big stocks of spare parts or not functional models that can be used for that.
Well, it may be a good idea to build a new body, not now, but later. So keep your blueprints..
The specs on this camera was laughable. There are film cameras from the early 1990's with better specs, and autofocus. Just a really dumb idea.
I wouldn't say it was dumb.
1/4000 is not that innovative.. Minolta was offering up to 1/8000 on some models
Cool. You should make a video about it.
Bro really thought that intro was cinematic. 💀
More cinematic than your mum
@@ZainRiza Real
I had to turn this off last night because even on low volume the sound effects go straight through my wall 😂
How much bass is your speaker putting out? haha
@@ZainRiza depending on the media it’s somewhere between none and over 9000!
@@ZainRiza rewatched again though and it was a very good video, such a shame about the camera as it seems like an awesome idea to have the contarex style changeable backs and a changeable mounting plate for lenses like large format!
Wish Pentax would’ve taken this project on instead of working on a half frame toy 😭
and fail at the end? you obviously don't know how the market works.
@@SomeUnremarkableGuy yes very innovative. too many companies making SLR's atm. we need a half frame camera for once.
@@rayce not only that, you need to have customers for that, like, a lot of them. and half frame is perfect for the young people as they are going to post this photos on social media anyway where most photos are in portrait format. They are main target audience for this camera. I think Pentax did a good research on this, and if this succeed, we might see even an SLR camera.
@@SomeUnremarkableGuy there's a reason film prices are high. the market is already here. making another half frame camera isn't adding to anything. besides labs out here are charging more money for half frame rolls. an extra $10.
What so Ricoh/Pentax can go bankrupt too? The market for a brand new premium, sophisticated SLR these days is tiny. The market that will pay for what such a camera would cost to build these days is even smaller. While there’s still millions of perfectly excellent SLRs available for a fraction of their new price.
I did enjoy the video I give you a thumbs up And would have hit the subscribe button But there is one.
whoa that's so weird. If you hover over the watermark in the bottom right of the video, you'll get a prompt to subscribe. It may also be the browser that you’re on. Try using chrome. Thanks for pointing this out to me!
Awesome vid. I think the problem was management. Project management and creative, are almost poles apart. And when u have somebody that can jiggle the extremes , is when u have those miracle products that nobody saw possible. Thank u again
A great interview that will great to see, is Gary ho from mint camera, and his new rollei35af . And obviously Tko from pentax film project . Thx u that was a great conclusion of a beautiful history that never was...
oh nice. I'll have to check that one out.
An interesting story but I have to add it is the first time I have read or heard anything about this device.
it went under the radar after its initial hype for obvious reasons haha
Really cool vid man!
Glad you enjoyed it
damn your comment section is pedantic af 😂
you're telling me.
absolutely overratet concept
ok
Your wrong on there not being any changeable format 35mm cameras as there are a few out there. I almost bought one in Osaka.
please check my correction in the description.
wow... I never heard of this project!
Great video!
they sound like criminals
👀
This was a fanstastic video and deep dive
appreciate it!
Took my money and did not deliver, sorry no thumbs up.
I didn't take your money! haha
@@ZainRizaNever said you did
On an unrelated note, you may want to work on enunciation, you sound tipsy. Unless this video is sponsored by Heineken, than all good.
And please don't take this as a dig. It's just friendly constructive input since other than that it's a nice video!
yoooou taaakkkee thaaatt baack
The camera does not even have a unique and recognizable name. How could it have been successful?
I don't think the name is the problem.
I've read some kind of goodbye statement from the founder on Instagram
I think there was on sent out in the email newsletter which I deleted years ago. There should really be one on the KS page though.
@@ZainRiza yes could have been email. I was very disappointed too, although I didn't invest.