I have bought an Intrepid 4x5 Mk IV. This is the writeup of the first real walk with it.
My existing 4x5 camera is a Toyo 45 monorail, which is a proper studio camera and the camera I learned large format on. The Toyo is sturdy and heavy, and unapologetically meant for the studio or for working within thirty feet of the car. I love it for what it is and I am not getting rid of it. But the way I have been shooting recently has wanted something I can actually walk with, and the Toyo is not that thing. The Intrepid is.
The Intrepid is also so cheap. Mine cost £250 from intrepidcamera.co.uk, which is somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred pounds less than a comparable field camera from one of the established manufacturers. That price point is the whole point of the company. Intrepid was set up to give people an entry into 4x5 without remortgaging the house, and the Mk IV is the fourth iteration of that thesis. It works.
What the Intrepid is and is not
The Intrepid is a folding field camera made out of plywood. That description sometimes attracts a sneer but it should not. The camera is made out of laser-cut Baltic birch plywood with the kind of joinery that looks crude in photographs and turns out to be surprisingly considered in the hand. The bellows are leak-free, the rails are smooth, the focus knobs are firm and the whole thing folds down to a slab about an inch and a half thick that disappears into a small bag.
It is a 4x5 sheet film camera with all the usual movements: rise and fall on the front, shift on the front, swing and tilt on both standards and a fully rotating Graflok back. The lens board mount is the standard Linhof Technika size, which means any standard-fit large format lens will mount on it. The back accepts standard 4x5 film holders. None of the system is proprietary. None of it locks you into the Intrepid ecosystem.
What it does not have is the kind of mechanical certainty that an expensive metal monorail or wood field camera gives you. There are no detent stops at zero on most of the movements. The rear standard does not click into the vertical position the way the Toyo does. The dark slide can sometimes need a slight wiggle to release from the film holder and that wiggle can move the back if you are too vigorous with it. The bellows are stiff enough that when you put a tilt on the front standard, the springiness in the bellows wants to pull the standard back towards neutral if you do not lock it down properly.
These are not unreasonable things to expect from a £250 camera and Intrepid are quite upfront about what the camera is. The complaints I have seen on YouTube about the Intrepid being flimsy come from people who seem to have wanted a Linhof for £250. That is not a thing that exists. The camera is what it says it is.
First walk with it
I took the camera out one Saturday morning to a closed paintball centre near home. Paintball venues during a pandemic make wonderfully atmospheric subjects (lots of abandoned military-themed dressing in a field, with nobody around to interrupt). I had loaded six sheets of FP4 Plus and packed the Nikkor 210mm f/5.6 because it was the only lens I had with me on the day (I had meant to bring the 90mm and forgot it).
The kit weighed almost nothing. The camera in its small carrying bag and a Sirui carbon fibre tripod with a small ball head in another small bag was the entire payload. For the Toyo I would have been carrying a Manfrotto stainless steel tripod with a video head plus the considerably heavier monorail body, which adds up to a seriously substantial pack by the time you add film holders, a meter and a couple of lenses. The Intrepid kit is genuinely about a quarter of the weight of the Toyo kit, and the difference shows up in the legs by lunchtime.
The first frame was an abandoned military jeep against a wall in the car park. I set the camera up and levelled the standards by eye, framed at f/8 and 1/400 of a second on the Nikkor and exposed. The setup time was noticeably faster than the Toyo because there is less camera to assemble.
The ground glass on the Intrepid is the part of the camera I was least sure about before buying. In practice it is surprisingly bright. I did not need a dark cloth for the brighter scenes (I used a towel for the darker ones, which is what I always do on the Toyo too). Focus snapped in cleanly on the loupe and I could see corner sharpness without difficulty.
The next few frames were in a wooded area behind the paintball centre. There were some textured walls and a bin labelled “DEAD ZONE” that I could not resist. A scene through a small clearing needed a touch of front swing to get the depth I wanted, which the Intrepid happily provided. The movements are smaller than the Toyo’s and the camera is less stable when you push it hard on tilts, but for a Saturday morning walk shoot I never asked it for more than it could give.
The last frame of the day was the camera itself, sitting alone in the middle of a field while I set up the GoPro twenty feet away. The Intrepid is also a genuinely photogenic object. The plywood looks the part. People who like that aesthetic will know what I mean. The shot is on the YouTube video.
What the Intrepid does well
The portability is the headline. Folded, the camera takes up no real space. Open, it weighs little enough to use on a lightweight carbon tripod without worrying about the camera unbalancing the head. I have already taken it on walks I would not have taken the Toyo on. The Toyo would have stayed in the car. The Intrepid came with me.
Setup is fast. The camera goes from folded to ready-to-meter in under a minute once you have done it a couple of times. Pull the back up, secure the side struts, mount a lens, drop a holder in. The simplicity of the design is one of its strengths.
The ground glass is bright and the focus knobs are firm. The bellows are leak-free out of the box. The Linhof-board lens mount opens up the entire used 4x5 lens market to you without any adapters or extra costs. The Graflok back accepts standard holders so you do not need new film holders if you already have some.
And the price is genuinely the headline. £250 buys you a working 4x5 camera that takes the same lenses and the same holders as the £900 alternatives. The premium you pay for the £900 cameras buys you mechanical precision and longer-lasting build quality. If you do not need those things every time you press the shutter, the Intrepid does the job for a quarter of the money.
What the Intrepid does less well
The rear standard does not click into vertical the way the Toyo does. You eyeball it against the camera body and tighten it down where it looks right. In practice this is fine but I notice it every time I shoot.
The dark slide can be a touch sticky in the holders, and pulling it out hard can shift the camera slightly because the camera is light enough to be moved by the pull. The fix is to brace the back with one hand while pulling the slide with the other. The Toyo never needs this.
The bellows have enough resistance that when I put a strong tilt on the front standard, the standard wants to creep back towards neutral if I do not lock the tilt control down firmly. Same fix. Tighten the locks. Once they are tight the camera holds the movement.
The build is plywood. You can feel that the camera is made of wood and you can hear it when you handle it. If you are used to metal cameras the sound takes some getting used to.
None of these things are catastrophic, and all of them are the kind of small irritations that vanish into the workflow after a few rolls. None of them affects the negative.
Toyo vs Intrepid: which one when
I now have two 4x5 cameras and the question is when to use which. The honest answer after a few weeks is that they do different jobs.
The Toyo is the camera I want when I am in the garage studio, working slowly on a still life or a long portrait setup. The mechanical certainty of the monorail makes precise movements so satisfying. Big swings and tilts hold their position. The rear standard locks into vertical and stays there. When I am putting twenty minutes into composing a single sheet, the Toyo is the better tool.
The Intrepid is the camera I want when I am out of the studio and on foot. Anywhere more than thirty feet from the car. Anywhere I might be standing in long grass on a footpath, or where I might need to fold up and move on without much fuss. The portability of the Intrepid changes what I can shoot, and that change is more valuable than the small loss of mechanical certainty.
Neither is the better camera. Both are the better camera for their respective jobs. Owning both is not the financial extravagance it might look like, because the Intrepid is so cheap that adding it to a Toyo kit is the price of a decent meter.
Verdict
I am genuinely impressed with the Intrepid. The Mk IV is a considered piece of design for the budget. The small British company behind it is doing something truly worthwhile in keeping large format accessible, and the camera has already opened up shooting I was not doing before. The trade-offs are real but they are the trade-offs you bought into when you chose a £250 camera over a £900 one. Within that envelope the Mk IV delivers.
If you have been curious about 4x5 and the cost has been the barrier, this is the camera that breaks the barrier. Buy one and take it for a walk to find out whether large format is your thing, for less than the price of a decent meter. If it turns out to be your thing, you can upgrade later. If it does not, you can sell the camera on for not much less than you paid for it (Intrepid hold their value better than most budget cameras, because the supply is limited and the demand is steady).
The next outing for the Intrepid is going to be a large format pinhole experiment, where I make a pinhole lens board for it and see what happens with a 0.4mm aperture and no shutter. After that there are some longer-term plans I am still working out. The Intrepid has earned a place in the cupboard.