From: Freya (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2006 - 07:18:33 PST
--- Jason Halprin <email suppressed> wrote:
> Another spring motor camera that can be purchased
> for just a little
> more than a filmo (about $100-$150) is the Russian
Well that's quite a lot more unless you are getting a
high end filmo!! :)
> made Krasnogorsk
> K-3. These come standard with a single zoom lens
> (17-69mm), give you
> the ability to single frame, and lets you see what
> you are shooting.
> Also, it has a pistol grip and shoulder stock which
> makes it (IMO) the
> best low cost 16mm for hand held shots. Like the
> filmo it is heavy and
> sturdy (mine's bounced off a few boulders with no
> apparent damage), but
I'd be careful, a friend of mine had one in which the
case developed tiny cracks which let light in and
damaged the film. If you havn't tested it since, I
would run tests before your next project if it really
had that bad a fall.
The big problem with the K3 is that the build quality
is VERY variable. I was once on an overnight shoot
where a friend had 2 K3's and they both failed and we
had no film at the end of the shoot. Very bad.
The build quality is notoriously bad in fact, but you
can get lucky, and there is a company that will also
modify and service them to make them reliable, so that
is good too!
> alternate lenses are harder to come by.
Actually, the K3 comes in two types, the bayonet mount
for which it is impossible to get extra lenses for and
the M42 screw mount, for which it is unbelievably easy
to get really high quality lenses for.
The M42 mount was used on old pentax cameras and many
soviet SLR's too. You can get really high quality
soviet glass such as a Jupiter 8 lens and other zeiss
copies for very little. Often with a free SLR! This is
one of the massive benefits of the K3. Much easier
than getting c-mount lenses. Of course a lot of the
lenses available this way are a bit telephoto on the
K3 and wide angle lenses can be very hard to come by.
The camera is also easy to convert to S16 as lots of
people have done it and instructions are readly
available. You can even buy modified gates for the
camera. This is the other huge advantage of the K3.
However the K3 has nothing like the build quality and
indestructability of the filmo. You only have to look
at the two cameras to know this. The filmo was used
extensively as a combat camera and it is the 16mm
version of the eyemo which hollywood use as a crash
cam. It's all made of metal and has little holes
inside where you feed it oil, and you feed it oil and
it just keeps going. Even old bolexes need servicing
after a while, because they are like sophisticated
time pieces. The filmo is like some kind of machine,
and as long as it is fed oil it seems to remain happy
forever.
love
Freya
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