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!
