A New Film Camera, and It Only Uses Half of Each Frame

05.1 §1What the Pentax 17 Is

The Pentax 17, announced in June 2024, is a new-manufacture 35 mm film camera with a fixed 25 mm f/3.5 lens and a half-frame format. Every exposure covers 17 × 24 mm — roughly half the area of a standard full 35 mm frame — which means a 36-exposure roll yields 72 photographs. The name follows directly from the format: 17 mm is the width of each frame on the film strip.

The lens is a six-element, four-group design, retractable when the camera is not in use. Minimum focus distance is published by Ricoh at 0.25 metres. The viewfinder is optical, with a bright frame, and the camera uses a single CR2 lithium battery to drive the automatic exposure system. There is no autofocus: focus is zone-set manually via a dial. The shutter covers 1/350 s to 4 s in automatic mode, with a bulb setting available for longer exposures. The body measures 113 × 71 × 40 mm collapsed and weighs 185 g with batteries.

Film loading is conventional. The camera does not communicate with DX-coded cartridges; ISO is set manually, from 100 to 1600. There is a self-timer, a multiple-exposure function, and a shooting mode dial that selects between normal, portrait and landscape — each adjusting the exposure program. Ricoh has published no internal specifications for the metering sensor itself.

05.1 §2Why Half-Frame, and Why Now

The half-frame format is not new. Olympus produced the Pen series from 1959, and the format attracted a following through the 1960s before compact full-frame cameras and then 35 mm SLRs displaced it. The format's proportions — 18 × 24 mm, yielding a 3:4 aspect ratio in portrait orientation — were standardised at the same time as the full 35 mm frame. Ricoh's decision to revive it in 2024 is not purely nostalgic.

The viewfinder is optical, with a bright frame, and the camera uses a single CR2 lithium battery to drive the automatic exposure system.

Film costs money. A 36-exposure roll of Kodak Ultramax 400 or Ilford HP5 Plus — two of the most available emulsions currently in production — costs meaningfully more in real terms than it did a decade ago. Processing adds to that. Doubling the frame count per roll halves the per-frame cost of film and chemistry, which is a straightforward economic argument for a market largely composed of younger shooters who have not had time to build a large stock of unexposed film.

Grain is also a factor. At 17 × 24 mm, the smaller frame area means each grain of silver halide covers a proportionally larger share of the image when enlarged to standard viewing sizes. Ricoh's own marketing materials acknowledge the aesthetic, framing visible grain as a feature of the format rather than a defect. This is the engineering regression made explicit: the specification that would have been a liability in 1985 is positioned as a selling point in 2024.

The fixed lens removes a cost centre from the design. There is no K-mount here, no throat to machine to the 45.46 mm flange distance that defines every other Pentax body since 1975. The Pentax 17 is a self-contained object, not a system camera. Ricoh has made no public statement about expanding the Pentax 17 into a product family with interchangeable lenses.

05.1 §3Engineering Regression as Market Response

The camera industry context is legible in CIPA's interchangeable-lens shipment data, which documents a contraction from a peak of roughly 12 million units in 2012 to well under 10 million by the early 2020s. Against that, film camera production by major manufacturers ceased years ago — the Pentax 17 has no direct peer among new-manufacture products from Canon, Nikon or Sony.

What Ricoh has built is a camera designed around constraints that the digital market regards as problems: limited resolution, fixed optics, finite frame count, manual zone focus. Each constraint reduces cost to manufacture and, in the current market, carries cultural value among the segment buying film. The Pentax 17 is not a flagship. It is a volume calculation — that enough people will buy a well-made new film camera if it is priced and specified to match what they were already spending on disposables and entry-level used bodies.