Chroma six:17 Review

I got my Chroma Six:17 in the mail on Friday and took this to shoot a test roll with my Nikon 90mm SW lens. I took it to my parents house with hopes/dreams of shooting a Slim Aarons style pool photo. Not sure I got there in the end, but hey... it's a learning curve right?

Build quality is pretty nice and it feels sturdy/well made given it's a 3D printed camera. It was a lot bigger than I had imagined.

There are no instructions included, but set up is fairly straightforward as was loading the film. I did have a problem after I shot the first frame where the spool became loose and I couldn't advance, but luckily was able to pop off the back in a dark bathroom and fix the issue before shooting the next three frames.

The dark slide feels a bit flimsy and takes some coaxing to push in when it's loaded but a minor complaint. No light leaks so it did it's job.

I did get the optional fresnel from Burleys cameras, if you are considering one of these I'd highly recommend it as its pretty bright and usable even without a cloth shade. You will need to disassemble the ground glass holder to install it but that was pretty easy.

Developed and scanned myself which was a bit of a pain using Photoshop stitching with multiple shots. If anyone has any tips on how to do this better please let me know. Right now I am sandwiching the negative on my 4x5 holder and taking two shots with about 20% overlap.

If you are considering one of these cameras I would definitely recommend, my only caveat being that scanning (at least for me) isn't entirely straight forward and rather finicky. I was considering shelling out for an Xpan but I think this scratches my pano itch for now.