It Might Be A While Before Pentax Makes Another Film Camera
When Ricoh announced the Pentax 17, the response was overwhelmingly positive. With the new film camera floodgates suddenly open, Ricoh suddenly found fans of analog begging it for more.
Even after deciding that it wanted to launch a new film camera in 2024, Ricoh Pentax spent a long time deciding what kind of film camera it would be that would attract a new audience of users while also being something different than the large number of cameras that exist on the used market. The company reiterated this in an interview with PetaPixel at the CP+ show in Yokohama, Japan last month.
“Before we released the Pentax 17, of course we had very carefully studied the possible demand because no film camera had been released for 15 or 20 years. So that was this new challenge, not only for Ricoh but also for the industry I think,” Kazunobu Saiki, General Manager, Camera Business Division, at Ricoh, says.
Modern photographers might be surprised to hear that a new film camera sold well enough to warrant the years of development time. Saiki confirms that Ricoh considers Pentax 17 as a success in the branding and positioning of Pentax.
“We haven’t expected a huge number of sales [of the Pentax 17] from the very beginning of that project. In that frame of view, the number of cameras produced, it’s kind of a niche number,” he says. “But to be frank, the reaction was more than we expected.”
Still, the amount of work that goes into making a new film camera is substantial and Ricoh is focused on delivering a product that gives photographers something different than what can be found on the market already. Many Pentax film cameras already exist on the secondhand market and it did not seem as though Ricoh was keen on selling a product that would directly compete with something that already exists.
That is why the Pentax 17 made sense to Ricoh.
“It hasn’t been very long since the release of the Pentax 17. We have to approach users to hear what is their opinion, or in other words, what do we do to make it more attractive to our film users. So it might take time [before we make another film camera],” Saiki says.
“Like Fujifilm or Polaroid instant cameras, that’s a type of film, right? And for that kind of product, a lot of the younger generation has reacted to it. We haven’t seen that kind of number [of sales of our film products] but we want to have the core user in that new generation. So we still have to make the Pentax 17 more appealing to them.”
From Saiki’s explanations, Ricoh wants to boost the popularity of its Pentax 17 among that target demographic before it delves too deep into expanding its analog ambitions further — and that will take time. It may be even longer now with the lead designer of the Pentax 17 — Takeo Suzuki, known as TKO — leaving Ricoh. However, the company did say that “while TKO played a significant role in the Pentax Film Project, his departure does not affect the possibility of future film models.”
Image credits: Ricoh
