Why the Pentax 17 Won Me Back After a Year

The Pentax 17 landed in 2024 to a wall of loud opinions, and a year of actual use has a way of softening the sharpest first impressions. A camera you dismiss on a one-week deadline can look very different once you've dragged it through Colorado, the Jersey Shore, and a 4:30 a.m. boardwalk sunrise.

That reversal is the spine of a revisit from Jason Kummerfeldt, who admits his early take on the Pentax 17 was harsher than the camera deserved. The half-frame format was his original sticking point, and it still is. But the lens changed the math. Kummerfeldt calls it sharp enough to almost, though not quite, offset the resolution you give up shooting two frames on every 35mm exposure. He put that lens through infrared film and Kodak Ektachrome E100, and the results pulled him back to a camera he'd mostly been loaning out to friends.

Handling gets real attention here. The Pentax 17 is small, and Kummerfeldt found it awkward in larger hands, so he swapped the battery-chamber grip for a wooden one and stuck a thumb grip on the film door. Both are cheap, and both made the camera noticeably easier to hold. The top-plate buttons are a different story. They shift on their own, and you can find yourself shooting at minus 1.5 exposure compensation or stuck in bokeh mode without realizing it. Taping them down solves it, except the settings are ones he actually changes often, so the fix creates its own problem. Zone focus, another early complaint, mattered less than expected once he noticed he leaves the lens near infinity most of the time anyway, with an occasional portrait.

Half frame comes with a quirk worth understanding before you buy in. A smaller negative means the effective focal length behaves differently, and depth of field runs deeper than you'd get on full frame at the same aperture. That's part of why the fixed-distance zone focusing forgives you as often as it does. Deeper depth of field pulls more of the scene into acceptable focus, so a rough guess at distance still lands. It also explains the 72 frames per 36-exposure roll, which turns a single roll into room for doubles and cheap insurance against a shot you're not sure you nailed. This is the trade the whole camera is built around: less fidelity per frame in exchange for portability, twice the shots, and a lens that punches above the format. It fits a snapshot shooter who wants film in a bag at all times, not someone chasing maximum resolution.

The nitpicks pile up honestly. The viewfinder carries a blue cast and some field warp that make you doubt a shot before you've even taken it, which stings on film you can't chimp. The shutter cable release uses a proprietary Pentax port rather than the universal screw-in kind, reportedly because Pentax runs internal diagnostics through it. The electronic shutter tops out at 4 seconds, and the f/3.5 lens asks a lot in low morning light. Kummerfeldt also flags the bigger uncertainty hanging over the whole thing: the camera's designer has left Pentax, which makes the future of the line an open question even as a black version keeps surfacing on social media.

Watch the video above to see how the E100 frames actually turned out and whether Kummerfeldt's peace with the Pentax 17 holds up by the final roll.