Pentax 17 Revisited

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. What's up, alphas? Well, it only takes the truest, most incorruptible alpha to admit it because I've never made a single mistake ever on this channel. But I might be rethinking my original and harsh and a little more negative opinion on the Pentax 17. When this camera first hit the summer lookbook of 2024, a lot of people had really intense thoughts on it, myself included. Here's the thing, the Pentax 17 is notoriously a half-frame camera and half-frame isn't exactly what I'd call professional quality, most of the time. Actually, ever. If you're venturing out into the field to have fun with film, which is a lot of effort sometimes, you'd probably want to capture your work with decent image fidelity. At least that's how I feel. But what I might've originally overlooked on my review of this camera, which I only had a week to make, is the lens. It's pretty sharp. So sharp that it almost, not quite, makes up for the loss of quality rendered by half-frame. I never really picked up the Pentax 17 much following its release in 2024. I often just lent it out to friends and it was kind of out of sight, out of mind. But I seem to vaguely remember something pulling me back in. Oh yeah, it was a hyper fixation to prove that this line in the manual is pure farm grade hog ----. Since all that, I've been out and about quite a bit this summer, cooking up some bangers on the grill. And I've been bringing the Pentax 17 along for a lot of it. I absolutely ripped it in Colorado, like a New England guy ripping Dunkin' Donuts and then clogging the toilet. I did it with nothing other than infrared film. And the 17, it did not disappoint, which did get me thinking, maybe there is a bit more utility to this camera than I originally thought. It's not fun to talk about this heat at all. This forecast the past few days has just not been conducive for a lot of your time spent outdoors. So we got the fog at the coast, that's moderating temperatures all day long for our coastal areas. Even with that cool morning inland, we've got a hot afternoon ahead of us. Han and I had a clear evening in the forecast out on the coast, and we decided to make the most of it. After all, photography lives on its feet. Statistically, 15% of my audience just got excited because I said feet. Anyway, with the camera in your upper body feet, aka your hands, it's a bit small and challenging to use, especially with, you know, American fingers. But I do think one of the best things that I did for the 17 recently was to upgrade the tactility a little bit. Starting with the grip slash battery chamber, I replaced it with a slightly larger wood finish grip. For sure, it definitely makes the camera look a little bit better, but it also makes it a little more grippable. It's like wearing Crocs in the shower. I also ordered this thumb grip for the back of it. It adheres to the film door quite nicely. And I gotta say, for a cheap piece of plastic, it massively improves the comfortability of this camera for me. Can't wait for it to degrade into microplastics and be inside me. Light's almost there. Light is almost there. Anyway, these photos are pretty nice. I especially like this one. It's still got some breakup and I guess quality loss from the format, though. I guess an overly sharp lens can't completely ward off resolution loss, even on E100, which everyone says is sharp, but only in every other format besides 35. Where do they keep coming from? Anyway, the golden hour light was yet to come, and well, E100 isn't cheap enough to find out later that the light could have been better. Coming back for it in 30 minutes when the light's a little bit better. But look at that comp, it's nice. So we parked ourselves at a bench and waited it out. I guess the view was not too bad. Feel like that is about to fall off the edge of the cliff. So I've been using this camera quite a bit and I even joined a Pentax 17 survivors support group and we all had one thing to say for sure. The buttons on the top of this thing, they get moved way too easily, sometimes completely at random, it seems, like the ghost that keeps moving in my guest room. It'll just look down at one point and realize you've been shooting it like minus 1.5 exposure compensation, or I don't know, you've been in bokeh mode the whole time even though you set it to something else. I would say the solution is to just tape it or red lock tight it down, but I do change these settings quite frequently depending on the situation. Anyway, the light touched down and it was go time in and amongst these seaside cabins that are literally impossible to reserve. Unless of course you hopped on the website way back in the Paleolithic era. So us outsiders just have to creep around the property and observe others having a pleasant time like perverts. Whatever, I'm not mad. I got to sleep in a warm bed surrounded by insulation that night. So if one of my major complaints, major complaints, is sort of a non-issue right now, then what about the other one? Zone focus. So initially I did find it a bit of a strange, I guess, design choice to automate exposure functions of this camera, but then make it manual focus on this camera. You're just kind of guessing focus distance with some clever focusing aids on the front of the lens. But I don't know, that's still kind of a scary prospect for all the newcomers, especially with the ever expensive film. Who needs sex anymore when I'm getting f**ked by this ******* film? Prices! I mean, on one end, it definitely helps a lot for shots like this where the window glass might trip up an autofocus system and you can just tell your camera to stop overthinking it and it does. I wish humans could do that too. Would autofocus have been better? Maybe. It certainly would have sold more. That and at the time of release, I remember a lot of people complaining about the cost of the camera, which only would have been significantly higher if there was an autofocus system in it. But I guess in hindsight, it wasn't that bad, huh? I will say that this focus confirmation argument for myself is a little unfounded. I realized that when I shoot this camera, I pretty much just end up leaving my focus on mountain most of the time anyway. I shoot most of my work at, or I guess near infinity with the occasional portrait thrown in there. Throw in that this camera is half frame, which of course smaller formats yield less depth of field. Don't have time to explain, but it's a thing. I can come to forgive the zone focus thing a little bit. And of course you get 72 frames on a roll of 36 to shoot doubles, even triples if you think you messed up, which for sure you did, loser. I ******* love this shot. Great colors and layering. To be honest, I love all the photos from the set, but I was pretty on the fence about a lot of them while out there shooting. Not because I doubt my skills, which I do, but because the viewfinder isn't exactly reassuring. The viewfinder's got an ugly blue cast that kind of tricks your brain into thinking the shot will be, I guess, not so great color-wise. It definitely makes me hesitate often when I'm about to take a photo, not to mention a little bit of field warp and crowded frame lines in the viewfinder. It doesn't really inspire a ton of confidence in the user when taking a picture. So imagine my own surprise when I went home feeling like I didn't really get anything substantial. And I get the roll back and it's filled with fresh out of the griddle McGriddles, you know what I mean? After all that, me and my totally normal-looking girlfriend, Monica, who doesn't look like an angry deep-sea grouper at all, caught a red-eye. Only called a red-eye because we were crying that we had to go to Philadelphia. But we eventually caught a bus to Atlantic City where I was excited to do all the Atlantic City things like observe local wildlife, but then, of course, load up some more E100 in the Pentax. All right, made it to Atlantic City. And the weather is kind of ----. Let's see if the Pentax 17 can pull something out of its ass. Anyway, with uninspired lighting outside and a mysterious boardwalk concoction in hand called the Permanent Blackout, I made do with what was available. Okay, now go out there and yell shark. The light sucks. So I really enjoy how low-profile this camera can be, but I think the team over at Pentax made several design flaws, the biggest of which, in my opinion, is simply the shutter cable release port right here. You have to buy a separate proprietary Pentax cable to use it. It's not the universal screw-in ones that fit most analog cameras across different brands. I mean, it's not like anyone's doing super long exposures on this thing anyway because the electronic shutter's maximum is like four seconds. Not really a lot of time, but also plenty of time, depending on what we're talking about, player. I brought up the cable thing to Pentax directly, and they said this email isn't in service anymore. I'm just kidding. They went with this proprietary port instead because they have tools internally at Pentax that use this port for diagnostic information, like how aliens use our buttholes for information. Whatever, okay, fair enough, Pentax, but I still find it quite annoying. I'm not gonna talk too much tonight, but first and foremost, from all of us up here on stage to each and every one of you out there, you look good. Very excited to be here in Atlantic City. Anyway, we spent our next few days down the shore, you know, just enjoying our time in the warm Atlantic air. This is a place I've photographed quite a bit over the years. It was no sweat off my back, and believe me, there was plenty of it. I throw the 17 into my bag anywhere we went, just to use as sort of like an easy snapshot camera. You know, when the good light shows up and it's time to photograph the local hot log hole. I even brought it along to get ice cream and let the fluorescent lights work there. Abstract green magic on E100. For being handheld at night, I'm definitely surprised the 17 pulled these off. One evening, we went to a local beach to shoot some magic hour maternity photos. Not of me, but in between, I snapped a few half-frame photos, like this one pointed directly at the undergooch of the sun. I gotta hand it to that Pentax 17 lens. It's quite good. No lens flare, no spooky ghosting, and it's able to retain colors quite beautifully. I also got this shot of this couple walking along the beach, which originally I didn't really think much of until two minutes later when this guy proposed. Kind of makes this one feel a little special for sure. I mean, she said no, but I guess romance was in the air, so maybe I'll finally find true love's kiss with the Pentax 17. The work was just getting started, though. That morning, I was off to photograph the boardwalk at sunrise, starting at a rough 4.30 a.m., which is 1.30 a.m. California time. Can you believe that some people get up and willingly go for a run at this time? Well, today is July 3rd. Happy wedding day to Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift. I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person, but I didn't get an invite. This lens is a f3.5, so yeah, it was a little bit of a stretch trying to get anything decent in this low morning ambient light, but the occasional underexposed moody photo did turn up. There are times I do wish this camera had some sort of telephoto attachment. I'd say 80% of the time, the native lens is good enough, but sometimes I do wanna punch in a bit. 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So I am a little bit concerned about the future of the Pentax 17. The designer of that camera is no longer with the company, but that being said, it is kind of a fun thought experiment to imagine what subsequent releases of this camera would look like. A black version of this camera has been teased on social media a few times, and all I really have to say about it is give it to me already, daddy. I mean, that would be an awesome thing to have a full release for. I would definitely throw money that I don't have down on it. And, you know, maybe eventually we'd get a full frame variation of this camera. Though, admittedly, I've always been pretty curious about what would happen if you just open up the lens chamber and file down the sides of the masks here to be full frame, and then just advance twice every photo. Anyone got a Pentax 17 that they wanna see get destroyed in the name of science? In the end, a lot of the gripes that I originally had with this camera are still present. Half frame is just not really a professional format. Not that I really even know what that means. I'm not a professional, but I do make money off photography, barely. Ultimately, I don't really know why they decided to go with half frame. Actually, that's not true. I just can't say publicly, but I still think it remains as one of the biggest detriments to this camera, aside from requiring a battery to operate it. I mean, I didn't even touch on scanning half frame, which is its own can of worms. Regardless of all the flaws outlined in this video, I still think the Pentax 17 holds the title of best half frame 35 millimeter film camera made by a Japanese company, starting with the letter P, in the last 25 years.