Re: student looking for first super 8 camera

From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Feb 15 2006 - 04:48:00 PST


> One thing I don't know:
> The old cameras were made for a two stock world;
> Kodachrome and Ektachrome
> and had limited mechanisms to read the ASA from the
> film cartridges (and

There is a little button that gets pushed in by the
cart, and it only tends to support 40 or 160ASA. Some
cameras will support all the way to 400ASA but it is
rare. Of course if your camera has manual exposure,
then you can use an external meter and set the ASA by
hand.

> there's no manual setting on these things other than
> going to manual
> exposure and pushing or pulling your exposure enough
> to match the actual
> ASA to what the camera thinks it is. The 'newer' XL

Actually, there can often be no manual exposure on
cheaper cameras at all which means they are fairly
useless with the new stock. :(

I would recommend avoiding anything without manual
metering, not just for this reason, but also because
on second hand S8 cams, the metering is often the
first thing to go bad. If you have manual exposure you
just have to do it yourself, if not, you have a weird
and funky camera that may be completely unusable. :(

> cameras usually read a
> wider range of exposure settings from the carts.
>
> Anybody here know what the new Kodak S8 stock, the
> 'Kodachrome
> replacement' requires in terms of the exposure
> settings inside the cameras
> and what camera types will accomodate it and what
> won't (if any).

The new stock is 64ASA, so it tends to get overexposed
a bit in some cameras (not good as it is reversal).
Some people don't seem to mind. It also requires a
different filter for shooting in daylight (85B), which
is slightly different to the internal filter but some
people just shoot with the internal filter anyway.

Who knows what cameras can accomodate the proper
notching. I think some of the higher end canons do,
but there are so many cameras out there it's hard to
say.

But hey, these aren't the only filmstocks out there,
theres the vision2 200 colour neg stock that should
work okay in all cams, (but obviously not great for
projection) and there is tri-x, which may get a tiny
bit overexposed but only by 1/2 a stop or something,
so you can probably wing it as they say. I've heard
that plus-x is still rated at about 40 ASA if you
process it as a negative by hand, but then that's not
so good for projection either.

So I recommend tri-x if you want to project. I think
it looks great too but that might be me! :)

love

Freya

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