A new hand-held large format camera is “coming soon.”

A new hand-held large format camera is “coming soon.”

I saw a video this week on YouTube about a 4x5 film camera explicitly designed to be carried and used without a tripod. It uses a mirror and a ground glass for top-down focusing and weighs “just over 2kg.”

This 3D-printed camera also comes with a unique focusing screen mask designed to host a mobile phone for immediately capturing the ground glass output on your digital device. While that may seem unusual and unnecessary at first, from what I understand, it’s a genuinely novel feature that lets you capture the world (inc. video) through the 178mm (50mm eqiv.) large format lens — which gives you an advantage of the incredible depth of field in a wide-angle. If you’ve ever tried to capture the view through a viewfinder of a regular film camera, you’ll know it’s nearly impossible to do it well. But a large ground-glass plane can make it happen.

The project, along with tons of sample photos, lives on Instagram: instagram.com/smartflexcam… and the website: smartflexcamera.com/

The video itself is here: youtube.com/watch?v=qM8_7U…

#editorial