Pentax 17: Toy Camera, Serious Camera, Or Something in Between?
I only had time to shoot two rolls of film during my time with the Pentax 17 and was impressed by how many keepers I had and how accurately the frame lines composed my final images. Even up close, the frame lines were quite accurate.
While I love getting nerdy and pixel-peeping shots from full-frame cameras with high-end lenses, I can acknowledge that sharpness and resolution don’t matter as much on a half-frame point-and-shoot film camera. You’re likely to view the scanned film images on small screens or uploaded to social media like Instagram, where pretty much anything can look fine. But the Pentax 17 does have a punch to its images that you’re not going to get as consistently with cheap film cameras like the $40 Kodak Ektar H35.
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The Pentax 17 operates a lot like most analog cameras before it, with a manual advance lever, film rewind crank, and a simple yet bright viewfinder with frame lines for an approximation of your composition. There really aren’t many modern affordances given, aside from a CR2 battery hidden beneath the built-in grip that powers the camera and its partially automatic functions.
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There are setting dials along the top of the camera, a manual film advance lever, a power switch to turn it on and off, and a window at the back to hold the end of the film box so you remember what you’ve loaded! The camera has an aux input for using an electronic cable release, and on the bottom there’s the tripod thread and rewind button.
The Pentax 17 has an inbuilt flash which you can leave in automatic mode (the camera decides when to use it) or turn on/off yourself by choosing different shooting modes. The flash is pretty powerful for such a small unit – one of the several moments that I really noticed the benefit of modern tech in an analogue camera!
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