WideluxX Presale Launch
A Special Guest Article by Peter KcKinnon
WideluxX Prototype 0003
Image copyright SilverBridges GmbH
The presale of the first production run of the new WideluxX is now open at wideluxx.com.
We’re especially pleased to share this news, as SilvergrainClassics print magazine announced the WideluxX project to the public with a special panoramic-focused issue back in 2023.
SGC is very happy to welcome Peter McKinnon as a guest writer for this special article. Peter is a photographer, filmmaker, and widely followed creative voice whose work reaches a global audience across YouTube and social media, while staying closely connected to the craft and joy of making pictures.
Few people have introduced more photographers to the Widelux in recent years, so it felt only right to invite him to share why this camera continues to matter — and why its return is such exciting news.
Kaleo at Red Rocks, by Peter McKinnon
The Widelux Is Back. Like, really, really back.
Alright, pull up a chair, pour yourself something hot. Preferably coffee. You have some reading to do.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you already know I have a handful of cameras I genuinely love and obsess over. The kind of love where I ramble about them to anyone who will listen. People slowly back away. Right near the top of that list — probably at the top depending on the week — is the Widelux.
I made a video about it a couple years back. I called it My Favourite Camera of 2024. I wasn’t being dramatic. That thing has lived in my bag, on my shoulder, in my hands. It’s been through airports and alleyways, seen an epic solar eclipse, and photographed celebrities.
Every time that little lens sweeps across a scene and I hear that beautiful mechanical turret spin, I feel it in my bones. So when I tell you what I’m about to tell you, understand I’m writing this with shaky hands and a very large cup of coffee.
The. Widelux. is. coming. back.
Omg!
Blink 182 in Toronto, by Peter McKinnon
A Little History, in case you didn’t watch my video (you should), and because this camera deserves it.
The Widelux is a swing-lens panoramic film camera from 1958, originally built by a Japanese company called Panon. Instead of a traditional shutter, it has a 26mm lens that swings from left to right on a rotating drum while a small slit exposes the film behind it. Quite clever, and oh so fun to fidget with.
The result is a 126-degree field of view stretched across a negative that’s twice the width of a normal 35mm frame, roughly the same arc your peripheral vision covers. It sees the world the way you do.
Panon stopped making them in 2000. A fire at the factory effectively ended any hope of a comeback. For the last two decades, if you wanted a Widelux, you were scouring eBay and praying to the film gods that the one you found hadn’t been dropped, over-cranked, or “serviced” by someone’s uncle. (Never spray WD40 into a camera.)
You see, Panon didn’t just close up shop. Their original mechanical drawings are gone. Burned. No blueprints. No spare parts. Nothing. So what do you do when you want to rebuild one of the most mechanically complex cameras ever made with zero drawings?
You reverse engineer the whole thing. Part by part.
Taking original F8 cameras apart. Measuring every component, machining new ones, testing, iterating, rebuilding. The new camera, called the WideluxX, is being built in Germany: handmade, fully mechanical, no plastic, running on green energy.
Marwan El Mozayen testing WideluxX Prototype 0003
The project was initiated by Jeff Bridges. He carried the Widelux torch for years, and now he’s found the right people to turn it into a camera you can actually buy again. Jeff didn’t do this alone. Alongside him are his wife, photographer Susan Bridges, plus Marwan El Mozayen and Charys Schuler, names many film photographers will know from SilvergrainClassics magazine.
The WideluxX is based on the F8 but with meaningful improvements along the way. The team has been very clear about this: the DNA, the quirks that made it magical, are preserved. The parts that made it temperamental and moody — the fragile bits, the weird noises mid-pan, the rewind knob that has drawn blood more times than I’d like to admit — those are getting the engineering pass they’ve always deserved.
Original specs, meaningful upgrades. That’s the line. From everything I’ve seen, they nailed it. Anyone can announce a comeback. Building one that already makes great photos in field tests is something else entirely.
But let me go back to Jeff Bridges. Yes. That Jeff Bridges. He’s the name most tied to this camera, and the reason a lot of us heard of it in the first place. He’s been shooting with a Widelux on movie sets since 1984 — before I was born.
Jeff Bridges, by Susan Bridges, shot with WideluxX Prototype 0002
A small sample of Jeff’s work can be seen in our online portfolio here.
His BTS work from films like The Big Lebowski, Seabiscuit, True Grit, and the Tron movies is some of the most beautiful, human, cinematic photography you’ll ever see. He earned an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography for it in 2013.
His photo book, Pictures Volume One, is my favorite photo book of all time. I still remember the first time I saw frames this wide. Every scene it captured, no matter how ordinary, felt extraordinary. It offered a perspective I’d never seen before in a photograph.
Subway, Frankfurt, by Marwan El Mozayen, using WideluxX Prototype 0003
More amazing Widelux photography can be seen in our online portfolios here.
Kubrick also shot with a Widelux. NASA flew one on Gemini 5. This camera has been places.
However, it’s not a camera that always behaves. There are only three shutter speeds. The viewfinder is a suggestion at best. You have to hold it in a very strange, awkward grip. It’s got weird quirks, like having to set the shutter speed before you wind it.
BUT THE IMAGES! My god, the images. There’s a reason people don’t shut up about this thing. Myself included.
Kiefer Sutherland, by Peter McKinnon
A story that comes to mind, and one of my favorites with this camera, was photographing Kiefer Sutherland. One of those guys whose presence fills a room before he says a word.
Like a lot of actors at that level, he has a wall up. Rightfully so. You don’t get to be Kiefer Sutherland without learning to hold something back from whoever’s pointing a lens at you.
I was trying to be kind and charming and funny (but not too much of either), doing the thing you do, trying to find the crack in the armor where the real person lives. I was getting nothing. He was nice, professional, polite… and indifferent. You could tell he’d done this exact scenario thousands of times before.
But…
When I pulled out the Widelux, his whole face changed. He recognized it instantly. He said something like, “Is that a Widelux?”
Turns out he’d done a film with Jeff Bridges years back, and at the end of the shoot Jeff had put together a photo book for the entire crew, all shot on his Widelux. Kiefer had one.
The second he saw that camera in my hands, the wall just… came down.
We started talking about Jeff. About the book. Real conversation. Real warmth. Genuine.
The frame I got of him in that moment was hands down the best of the entire session. Not because of the light, the composition, or the absurd amount of haze I had my friend Jay pumping into the air. It was because he was there. He was present.
This weird, mechanical, 70-year-old design unlocked a human being in a way that all my coffee-fueled charm could not.
That’s the Widelux. That’s the thing that’s hard to put into words. It’s a bridge between you and whomever you’re pointing it at, and somehow between every person who’s ever held one.
WideluxX inner mechanism
First run: 350 cameras. That’s it.
If you’re looking for one, orders are live now at wideluxx.com.
Price: $4,400 USD plus insured shipping, taxes, and duties. €5,200 (incl. VAT) plus shipping in Europe.
First units ship in 6–8 months. Full run within 12 months.
2-year warranty. Actual, real, honor-it warranty. On a handmade mechanical film camera.
Full refund if they miss the timeline.
First-run cameras are personalized. You’re not getting serial #00247. You’re getting yours.
350 is not a lot. Once collectors, shooters, and Dudeists enter the room, it gets even smaller. Film photographers have been whispering about this camera for twenty-five years. You do the math.
WideluxX Prototype 0003 detail
I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve seen enough launches to know when something feels real. I’ve seen a lot of cameras launched. A lot of revivals. A lot of crowdfunded projects that sounded incredible on paper and delivered something far less, or didn’t ship at all.
This is different.
This is four photography-crazy people building something real, not a famous name on a box. Behind them is a small, highly skilled, obsessed team in Germany who reverse-engineered the entire camera.
Film isn’t dying. We keep being told it is. It keeps proving otherwise. Cameras like this — the ones that actually change how you see — are exactly why.
Maybe their next undertaking is the medium format version. Guess they’d call that the WideluxXX.
Peter McKinnon
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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