One of the most common questions I get is: “Do you make a digital adapter for my medium format camera?”
Usually this means 120 roll film cameras like Hasselblad, Mamiya, Holga, Bronica, Pentax 67, Rolleiflex etc. Occasionally it's about the Baby Graflex 2¼” which is a beautiful camera, but the answer is basically the same.
While the idea sounds straightforward at first, creating a phone-to-medium-format adapter comes with a long list of optical, mechanical, and practical challenges and compromises that make it a very different proposition from the large format cameras the ObscuraFlex system was originally designed around.
The main reason I invented the adapter was for cameras you can’t get film for anymore (like my beloved Polaroid Land Camera), and for large format cameras (like 4x5) that can be very expensive to shoot with. These formats suffer far less from the issues discussed here because of the much larger image area. Larger formats also have optical characteristics that make them visually distinct from, say, a full frame mirrorless camera shooting at f1.4 which can often pass for medium format shots based on their look.
There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns when exploring 2¼” formats for a system like this. If you can just drop a roll of 120 in the back and shoot film for maybe 75¢ a shot, the downsides of this type of adapter really start to outweigh the benefits. You’d basically get a softer, grainier, more vignetted version of the same image.
The smallest I’ve gone with a modern iPhone compatible ObscuraFlex was 6x9, and even that was mostly an experiment for my Mamiya Universal. Having already designed one for the physically similar Polaroid 600SE it seemed logical, but I stopped selling the Mamiya version because of all the reasons above. It also doubled the length of the camera, which was honestly kinda silly looking.
Technical Reality
The technical complications are basically a matter of physics: size, distance, minimum focus, macro-lens distortion, etc.
Then there are the engineering tolerances. With fixed housing lenses, preset infinity focus points, and perhaps most importantly... film planes that sit inside the camera body, and everything having to be engineered to 0.1mm tolerances. That starts leaning much more toward precision machined metal unibody construction like most modern cameras (including the iPhone) which for a niche product would likely push the cost into the $1,000+ range.
On top of that, even the finest focusing screens have an inherent texture. The material I use has a look somewhat similar to classic Tri-X grain inch-for-inch. At 4x5 scale that’s very acceptable — even pleasing — and helps reduce the “digital” feel. But when you shrink that surface area down by 75%, dust, texture, and grain become much more obvious, and the results start feeling more novelty than practical.
It’s also worth mentioning that true digital backs already exist for many medium format cameras. These are purpose-built systems with precise optical tolerances engineered from the ground up for the format. They’re not cheap, but they are the “correct” solution if the goal is true digital capture from a medium format camera, rather than an intentionally experimental or lo-fi process.
So while I’m always open to brainstorming new versions of the ObscuraFlex, and I have actually made one for a 6x9 Mamiya Universal... it’s not something I’m actively pursuing for other cameras right now.