Many of the film cameras that people 3D print essentially outsource that stuff to off-the-shelf focusing helicoids which are readily available, along with medium or large format lenses which are traditionally mounted in a leaf shutter anyway. So the hard parts (lens, aperture, focusing mechanism, shutter) are not part of the 3D print itself. You're right that 3D printing a serious shutter mechanism for anything other than a pinhole camera isn't really feasible (yet?). It's the light tight box and the film transport that are completely reasonable to print.

Pinhole cameras can be nothing but a soda can and a hole in it. Large format and some medium format folding camera shutter lens units just need a round hole to slip into and all the controls are external and built in

RTFA. It clearly shows typical camera lenses in use on most of the cameras. The lens from a large format "press camera" (1) is often used because they'er available for reasonable money and usually have full manual controls, including the shutter release.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_camera

Only if you want a fairly compact camera supporting various shutter speed including some very fast ones, high speed films and lenses, and the kind of subjects that you want to take picture of. Once you are going much slower things can be less precise.

You can make a camera out of a cardboard box really. That won't do for a wildlife or olympic games professional photographer obviously.

Ever heard of a Holga? The only metal parts in one of those are a single spring and some clips to hold it together.

> should require

Thats just like, your opinion, man.

Ignoring the other comments, if you want to make a film camera that isn’t a pain in the ass, yes. Otherwise you can get away with quite a bit.

You’re not going to get 1/1000+ shutters and all that though.