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Pentax's new 17 camera reimagines the 90s kid camera with an oddly sophisticated $500 twist - featuring a motorized manual focus system that makes it 2024's quirkiest release.

The Pentax 17, is perhaps the single quirkiest camera released in the past decade (it makes the 2022 reissue of the Leica M6 look positively normal by comparison). The $50,000+ Phase One XC gives the new Pentax a run for its weirdness, but I can’t think of anything else that does.
The Pentax 17 from several angles – it screams “film camera” without looking like any particular film camera.
The Pentax 17 is essentially a better-built version of a $50 kids’ camera from the 1980s or 1990s, and Pentax wants $500 for it. I think some hipsters will pay the price, especially since good used film cameras are becoming harder to find, and new film cameras are either extremely cheap or extremely expensive (B&H lists only three new 35mm film cameras between $100 and $5500 – two Lomography models and the new Pentax 17).

The half-frame film format. Technically, this is the original 35mm format (used by movie cameras), and Oskar Barnack made the first Leica a double-frame camera, which 95% of all...

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Dan Wells, "Shuttterbug" on the trail, is a landscape photographer, long-distance hiker and student in the Master of Divinity program at Harvard Divinity School. He lives in Cambridge, MA when not in wild places photographing and contemplating our connection to the natural world. Dan's images try to capture the spirit he finds in places where, in the worlds of the Wilderness Act of 1964, "Man himself is but a visitor". He has hiked 230 miles of Vermont's Long Trail and 450 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with his cameras, as well as photographing in numerous National Parks, Seashores and Forests over the years - often in the offseason when few people think to be there. In the summer of 2020, Dan plans to hike a stretch of hundreds of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, focusing on his own and others' spiritual connection to these special places, and making images that document these connections. Over years of personal work and teaching photography, Dan has used a variety of equipment (presently Nikon Z7 and Fujifilm APS-C). He is looking for the perfect combination of light weight, ruggedness and superb image quality.
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