A camera project on Kickstarter with a brilliant feature - interchangeable backs

Have a look at the Samyang 135mm f/2 Ben. It's about as close to optically perfect as I've ever seen.

Whether its undetectable amount of spherical aberration also delivers perfect bokeh is, I suspect, entirely a matter of personal taste.

"Hypocritical? It's not a belief system.."

- Really not?
It seems to me that film use is evangelised and defended with a zealot enthusiasm that verges on fanaticism in some quarters. With film being supposedly imbued with mystical qualities that can't be emulated. (Despite the fact that the same mystical 'film' shots are being viewed as digital files online)

I actually find it quite sad that darkroom use is almost extinct these days, while film use is supposedly on the rise. There's still nothing to touch a genuine silver-gelatine print for B&W reproduction. Yet so-called film enthusiasts can only be bothered to go as far as producing a negative in their quest for the 'analogue' experience.

I applaud anyone who's still wet printing. Well done! It's just unfortunate that your tactile genuine prints can't be shared online like those 'shamalog' scanned efforts.

 

I find it interesting that someone is going to bring out a new 35mm camera to the market. I will follow along and see how it goes. I am trying to keep tabs on the Intrepid LF camera also. As far as 35mm goes I do have 3 cameras and they all work real nice. I'm a hypocrite photographer and scan B/W film and then print on my inkjet. I enjoy the process and my photos. I also have a Mirrorless camera and used it yesterday and took about 20 pictures of the Grandkids playing in the yard. It was fun. The photos end up being printed on the same inkjet and stored in the same photo album.

 

There are always people who go over the top about anything in photography, or indeed anything on the internet - see any discussion about UV filters! I don't see why a negative that ends up as a digital file is any less 'valid' than one that ends up as (say) a colour print. The grain that gives a film photo its texture is just as visible (often more so). One of the nice things about watching a movie on an HD format like Blu-ray is that you can see the grain that was lost in lower resolution formats.

Yes, a proper silver print can certainly be beautiful.

 

Actually, my favorite B&W film is Ilford XP2 and it's chromogenic with no silver at all after it's processed.

 

Back when we still had some labs around I used to shoot XP2 and the Kodak version. However once the labs all shut down I decided to start developing film myself and that has worked out well. HP5 and Tri-X are the usual films that I shoot.. I did like XP2 however.

 

The colleague who gave me his Coolscan shot XP2 by the bucket load before he went completely digital.

His chief reasoning was that it was significantly easier to scan than "real" B&W films.

I have to admit that I do like XP2, and there are times when paying the local lab $4.50 to develop it is appealing, albeit not as satisfying, as developing film myself. I also like the fact that the negatives print very nicely in addition to being easy to scan. I never had a lot of luck getting good prints from the Kodak products, and I suspect that the difference comes down to the fact that XP2 was DESIGNED to be printed on an enlarger while T400CN(or whatever it was called) seemed to have been designed to print well in a typical minilab set up for color.

 

For the record, here is an advertisement for the Contaflex interchangeable back:

Modern Photography 1962-March

 

I always rather liked the idea of the Rollei SL2000F/3003 models mentioned above:
Rolleiflex SL2000F - Camera-wiki.org - The free camera encyclopedia
It's a very nice piece of industrial design, like something that has slipped through from a parallel universe where 35mm cameras developed like medium format models.