A 3D-printed chassis built around a single conviction — that the camera is just a dark box, and the magic lives in the glass.
The premise
The O.ZONE strips the camera back to three components. The taking lens contains the shutter, aperture and release. The film back handles film flatness, advance and frame counting. The chassis between them does only one job — hold them at exactly the right distance.
It's the same logic as a Hasselblad SW612 or a classic press camera, but reimagined as a printable, modular platform you can reconfigure between formats in under a minute.
Why O.ZONE
For a long time, we've been told that "heavy metal" equals quality. But for photographers in the field, weight is a burden and high cost is a barrier. O.ZONE answers differently — by treating advanced additive manufacturing not as a cheap alternative, but as a superior engineering solution that bypasses the limits of CNC and mass production.
Traditional CNC cuts away from a solid, heavy block. O.ZONE builds layer by layer with intent — hollowing out non-essential areas with internal lattice structures while reinforcing high-stress points. The result is a camera body significantly lighter than metal, yet engineered to be incredibly rigid and durable.
CNC machining grows exponentially expensive as a design grows more complex, and injection molding demands tens of thousands of dollars in static tooling. We've removed those hurdles — implementing precision engineering that would be unaffordable with traditional methods, and passing the savings directly on.
Mass production forces designers to simplify shapes just to fit a mold. We don't have those limits. Every O.ZONE is sculpted for the human hand and balanced for the lens it carries. Because our manufacturing is digital and active, we adapt grips, mounts and tolerances to individual users on request.
Traditional manufacturing is static — once a mold is made, it never changes. O.ZONE is alive. Built across four years with more than 150 photographers worldwide, every piece of real-world feedback is integrated into the next revision. The camera you hold today is the result of continuous evolution.
Principles
The optical viewfinder sits separately from the taking lens. You compose, you guess focus, you commit — like an Xpan or a rangefinder.
No internal computer. No light meter. No internal battery. Every shutter is a Copal leaf inside the lens, capping at 1/500s.
Large format lenses don't have focus rings. The O.ZONE supplies them — 3D-printed helicoid threads engraved with a distance scale per lens, per body.
Swap the entire back. 6×12 panoramas, 6×4.5 portraits, Instax Wide instants — the same front standard takes them all.
How it works
1 — The lens
A Copal leaf shutter inside the lens controls exposure (B, 1s — 1/500s) and aperture. A standard PC sync port fires flash directly off the shutter. A custom helicoid wraps the lens in a focusing thread with engraved distances — calibrated to the chassis it's mounted on.
2 — The chassis
Different large format lenses need different physical distances from the film plane to reach infinity focus. So the O.ZONE comes in chassis depths — slim for short flange focal distances, standard for everything else. The body holds the lens, the cold shoes, the back.
3 — The back
A Horseman 6×12 roll back gives you six panoramic 56×112 mm negatives per roll of 120. A LomoGraflok 4×5 Instant Back gives you instant 99×62 mm prints. A Graflok 4×5 holder gives you sheet film. Same chassis. Same lens. Different image entirely.
Why 6×12
A 6×12 negative is 56 × 112 mm — a true 1:2 panoramic frame on standard 120 film. Cameras that natively shoot it (Linhof Technorama, Horseman SW612, Fuji GX617) have always been rare and expensive. The O.ZONE makes 6×12 the most accessible it has ever been, by treating the back as a swappable component instead of a fixed feature.
A 1:2 panoramic frame on 120 film — wider than 6×7, taller than 35mm panoramic.
Manual advance via ruby red window or mechanical lever. Twelve frames on 220. Each shot is a deliberate act.
Large format glass on medium format film. Fine grain, deep tonal range, the kind of negative that holds up at gallery scale.
Swap the back for a LomoGraflok and the same Rodenstock 75 mm produces handheld instant prints. Same lens. Same chassis. Different output entirely.
Origins
The O.ZONE began as a single 3D-printed body — the Mk.8 — designed around the Mamiya Press lens system, where the shutter, aperture and release already lived inside the glass. From there it grew: an Instax Wide back, a Horseman 6×12 back, then a 4×5 Graflok back, then custom helicoids for large format glass with no native focus ring at all.
What started as a printable medium format chassis is now a system that lets one person carry a true 4×5 camera, a 6×12 panoramic camera and an Instax Wide camera in a single bag — all sharing the same world-class glass.