Think of all those promised products that looked so good and were eagerly awaited, but never materialized. Have you ever backed a Kickstarter project in the vain hope that one day your novelty 3D printer might appear? Good luck with the wait! But sometimes, just sometimes, a product everyone thought was dead and gone pops up unexpectedly.
So it is with Kodak’s infamous new Super 8 camera, which they announced in 2018 and had the world of film geeks salivating over, then went quiet on. It’s abandoned, we all thought, and then suddenly five years later it isn’t. If you really must have the latest in analog film-making gear, you can put your name down to order one now.
The camera itself is a pretty good take on an 8mm movie camera for any decade, with crystal-controlled timing and a C-mount lens system with a widescreen film gate. As befits the 2020s, it has digital sound recording and an LCD viewfinder with HDMI output which we are guessing may be fed by a small camera sensor via a prism from the light path just like an old-style viewfinder.
Gone are the piles of AA batteries of yore in favor of a rechargeable pack, though apparently they’ve not considered that 2018’s micro USB could use an update to 2023’s USB-C. It’s in no way cheap though at a reported eye-watering $5495, which will make it a boutique camera. Even though it’s evidently a good camera, we think that’s very steep indeed for what it is.
So why are we enthusing about a new camera, and an unaffordable one at that? Simply because analog film is at heart a hacker medium, and there’s no need to shell out crazy money to get involved. Super 8 cameras were manufactured in their tens of millions from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, and though there are the usual eBay sharks there’s more than enough of them in second-hand stores to make the barrier to entry significantly lower than the cost of the film. This Kodak camera may be unrealistically priced, but it’s likely to trigger a new interest in thinking really carefully about each shot in your 3.5 minutes of footage. Go on – film your next hacker camp!
Thanks Gregg “Cabe” Bond for the tip!
“Boutique camera” is a good descriptor. Leave it on the coffee table like one of those huge, colorful-cover books intended to spark conversation but which are never actually read.
“Oh, it’s a video camera. No, it doesn’t do stills, it’s a film camera. Film. You know, that plastic stuff that used to be used for making images……..I have no idea, I guess you take the film out of the camera and look at it, or something. They didn’t include a magnifying glass…..”
You can take your film to your local FotoMat, and get it developed……. once you figure out how to travel backwards in the space-time continuum….
Getting Super 8 developed in 2023 means mailing it to a specialist. Of which there are still a surprising number.
Yes. I love this camera, but it’s ridiculously overpriced.
Everything cool is prohibitively expensive these days. Everything in general is too expensive
They need to make a projector to make it a complete system And to show old films
… just go to almost any thrift store or garage sale and you’ll find one. I have a couple that I’ve been given. Collecting dust.
You can still find them aplenty in just about any thrift store or garage/estate sale.
For this sort of extra expensive equipment USB-C is IMO way more effort than its worth unless you actually need something beyond the USB2.0 specs – suddenly have to worry about anything that may not properly meet the massive and complex spec for USB-C and so fry this niche so extra expensive product and a connector that can be either way up, which means your product would have to get more expensive and lots of R&D you already did is rendered pointless. USB2.0 and a micro connector is much simpler and perfectly reliable.
I’d also suggest the price is actually quite reasonable – with a 3d printer/cnc mill, some fairly cheap feed stock, moderately expensive optics and a heap of time you could make one or turn an older film camera into something with these updates for much less actual money, assuming you don’t count your time easily, if you do probably not by a huge margin. But to then turn that into a premium product you can reliably produce with a ‘mass’ production run to make the pathetic 100 odd that might be wanted… You don’t get the economies of scale sharing all this R&D and setup time, but you do get all the costs that go with it.
The one thing I’m really not sold on is that there is any point to analogue any more – for a still camera there are heaps of fun effects with multiple part exposures etc, but for a film camera I can’t actually see anything artistically interesting you can’t just do directly on a digital. So if anybody can come up with something I’d love to know what it is.
You’re conflating usb c with usb 3. Usb 2 works just fine over a usb c connector.
Not really – USB-C still have the flip connector that may or may not be properly wired up, and with USB-PD (which isn’t exclusively USB-C but is much more common) you could easily find that dumb not spec compliant cable/power supply that puts out more than the right voltage initially etc, so you want to put more effort into safeguarding your system from these risks. Especially on something so expensive. And USB 3 is on every other connector but C just as simple as USB-2 really, just with more pins.
For 5K they had better wire it up correctly.
Yeah but that isn’t the issue – the issues come when you want to use a cable/powersupply other than the one it came with or connect it to a device that didn’t bother to do it properly and find some cheapskate manufacturer as their device is 28v tolerant didn’t bother with the USB-PD stuff at all in the powersupply, or that their cable is missing the conductors you device actually needs, or that the device you are connecting it too got lazy and that either way insert cable will only work one way round, or works both ways round for most devices but only if every usb controller on the mobo is only in use by your main OS as that port actually split across two controller…
In most cases your 5K device won’t be harmed it will just not work, which is very annoying but not the end of the world – but when you only need USB2 speeds so much better to just sidestep the whole mess and be sure it will just work. Though with a device this size I think I’d have gone for a normal USB-B socket as those squarer connectors are so darn durable, still widely used for printers (etc) and this thing isn’t lacking for space…
It depends on what they’re using the USB-C for. If it’s just for power, there are many very inexpensive options; there are dozens of PD trigger boards on Amazon that allow you to get any one of the 5v-20v outputs at up to 100 watts, and these boards are $5 apiece. If it’s used for control and power, then there are a few inexpensive ESP32 options that offer this. Many devices use the superior USB-C connector for power and data but still only use USB2 or USB3 data transfer protocols, and these designs are trivial to implement with off-the-shelf parts.
What is the evolutionary advantage of nostalgia?
Hindsight.
Lets us at least observe the molasses-slow transition between a sclerotic boomer society into a sclerotic gen-x society
$5.5 k and no single frame? No cable release? Weird, my $5 Goodwill Super 8 does single frame…..
There is no market for this, in any way. If I want a ‘shelf piece’ I’ll get one for $5.
There is a market, collectors who will pay anything to get their hands on a rare camera. The value is in marketing for the rest of the Super 8 community, if it triggers a fresh interest in the format then getting and processing the film might become a bit cheaper and easier.
New is NOT rare, I have several 8mm and Super 8 cameras from the 60’s and 70’s…….
I wonder if they made the new film carts incompatible with the actual vintage cameras.
It’s Kodak…do you really need to ask? :-)
+1 Cause disk camera was a common thing, and the “modern” kodak has been sooo shead of the times in photography….
Single frame is no longer a useful feature. On movie cameras before the digital age, when creating stop-motion film without it would mean taking a ridiculously expensive number of still pictures, then splicing strips of them together. As an alternative to that, the single frame button on a movie camera was a very useful feature. Today not so much, since mashing a bunch of practically-free still frames together is something anyone can do with even free software.
Why not just rerelease the old version… where you had to hold it to your eye?
Why partially digitize it? I doubt anyone is really going to block shots on an HDMI-monitor in any serious manner if you are going to shoot 3 minutes of film, and I hope the camera internals have been soundproofed if you’re capturing audio from onboard mics.
Older is better, yes… taking old and adding a small computer to it for HDMI and audio recording isn’t always better.
Oh yeah… by the way, how easy is it to find Super 8 film stock? Ain’t just a run to the corner drugstore anymore, is it?
Its great to see companies make an effort to get more people to buy single use plastic!
Without Kodachrome, Super-8 is pointless.
This would have been much better as an open source project.
3D printed case, with interchangeable image sensors and film gate that just drop-in*
Neat idea, but badly executed.
Kodak can well pre-assembled components, or hon
bits can work forward from the basic case.
Here’s why that’s not necessary: with Kodak reentering the film camera market, this should reinvigorate the market. And with their offering being so ridiculously overpriced, there is space in the market for other people to join in the fun. This was not attractive until now, since Kodak could have just cut production of Super-8 film at any moment, for any of a number of reasons. This at least implies an extension on that moment. Alas, the price of movie cameras at Goodwill could even go up. This is the best time in decades to develop your own open-source film movie camera system.
So many misconceptions here. People shoot vision 3 on super-8 now which is professional negative film stock. It’s widely available and way more versatile than classic super 8 films. It has a c-mount, which means you can choose the lens. The aspect ratio of the gate is 3:2, unlike thrift store cameras, giving you a hair more resolution and a different aesthetic. This camera has modern sound sync, unlike thrift store cameras. It’s a big step up if you actually want to use it to make a film, which is entirely possible if that is what you are going for.
About that sound sync: assuming they are basing the sound recording on the same crystal clock that runs the motor (which I assume it is, since the camera only records sound when in 24 or 25 FPS modes), this would be a very good thing. I mean, sort of. In a three-minute shot, pretty much any two crystal clocks would have negligible drift with respect to each other. But for over $5k, it should have XLR inputs. Also, since they already have an electronic imager to do the viewfinder, this should also be recordable on the SD card, even if only at 480p resolution, providing an instant “work print”, without having to run a separate video recorder on the HDMI output. Just because somebody wants to record on film doesn’t mean they necessarily want to edit on film. And yes, I’m aware that this would not be a faithful representation of what was recorded on film, but it avoids having to wait for processing before you can start editing.
Last Christmas I spent two weeks in my basement painstakingly converting all of my grandfather’s 8mm film to digital. It was a gift to my father who hadn’t seen some of the footage in 50 years. A bankers box completely filled with film canisters fit on one SD card. I’m glad Kodak found a way for me to live the thrill of running film in a capture device frame by frame once again. But in all seriousness I was intrigued by the thought until I got to the price in this article. I never experienced shooting in 8mm though I am old enough to have plenty of 35mm experience. There is no instant gratification with film. You ether shot it correctly with the right amount of light and exposure or you didn’t. The worst part is not knowing until you get your film back from processing. Imagine taking pictures on your once in a lifetime vacation to find out that your shots were ruined by one technical issue or another. You find out after you get back home of course.
What is needed in super 8 , is what was and still is needed a affordable digital transfer system , for the film maker , it cost thousands to transfer film when making a super 8 feature film , not including buying the film and processing, so a affordable transfer would be nice