About the Leica Monopan 50 and the future of pack film.
Today, I met with Take Kayo — @bigheadtaco — and spoke to him about the immediate happenings at Leica and the Light Lens Lab. He had some very encouraging news for me from both campuses.
Take is a longstanding photography community member, gear reviewer, writer, and videographer. I’ve learned about his work through his pitch to StoryHive about the return of film photography more than eight years ago: youtube.com/watch?v=l9MGpc…. Today, he creates videos and runs monthly meetups in Vancouver, where film shooters from around the city convene.
Occasionally, Take brings representatives from Leica to his metups and he regularly chats with folks across the world about what they’re doing. So when I posted yesterday about my frustration about not being able to find the new Leica Monopan film, he had something to say:
“They didn’t realize how popular it would be. They’re working on a much bigger batch run.”
Today, Take recalled for me in person a conversation he had with a Leica exec about this film; he told them that whatever they’ve ordered from Adox (Leica Monopan is supposed to be the same or a modified version of the Adox HR-50 film, which is also out of stock at most shops) would not be enough.
Indeed, Leica designed several boxes for its film, prompting customers to order several rolls (to collect them all, of course). Meanwhile, folks like me drooled over the fact that a reasonably priced roll of film — $10 at the time of introduction — might be the cheapest functional photography Leica gear ever sold.
Take was right. The film sold out instantly. Some folks preordered weeks in advance, and others were lucky to live near stores with plenty of stock. But for most of us, this film was something we’ve heard about but never touched.
The good news, according to Take and his sources, is that there’s a new batch on the way. I don’t know when it’s coming, but it’s well on the way, and it is a much larger quantity, which I sincerely hope is enough to satisfy the still-growing demand for film products.
As we convened, Take also told me about his chat with someone from the Light Lens Lab, a Chinese camera, lens, and film manufacturer who shared their big plans last year for various film photography-related gear. One of them was pack film — a unicorn of photographic material.
Pack film is extremely expensive today, as the very last of its supplies are being sold at ever-increasing prices. Unlike integrated instant film (i.e., Polaroid, Instax), pack film offers greater resolution and is originally designed to be more precise overall. But it is also a very complicated product, one that Polaroid themselves declined to work on, and the variations distributed by companies like Supersense are difficult to assemble, are expensive, and, as I’ve recently found out for myself (see this post: analog.cafe/comments/m2c6), not worth the hassle.
The apparent manufacturing challenges of such a product gave me pause when I read LLL’s announcement of their intent to resurrect this format. However, Take told me that work on packfilm is still ongoing, and it may become a reality very soon.
Dmitri