New user needing help to get started

[mauch66]

Hello,
I am trying to find an inexpensive but versatile 8mm or Super 8 camera setup so I can film like the grandparents used to. I want that vintage fuzzy feeling in the recording and have read about a few cameras such as the Canon 310xl that funtion well without much light. I just don't want a camera with a perfeect crisp picture as I am going for that retro feel. Can anyone help me on the right track?
Thanks for your time.
Jay

[BolexPlusx]

Luckily for you many cameras can do what you want it to if you handle them right (or is that wrong?) You can play around with the focus, as in focussing well and then moving just a little off focus. You can miscompose scenes and tilt the camera. You can mess with the exposure and get that a little off as well.

If you are not used to using a Super-8 camera, this may just happen naturally.

Perversely, the better cameras make this easier because since they are more capable of breaking out of automatic or fixed modes, you have more freedom to skew these variables.

So sometimes it takes a lot of capability to really be not quite right!

PS: If you haven't messed around with Super-8, you will be surprised at the amount of light required, XL camera or not.

[mauch66]

Thanks for the advice. Any affordable and durable cameras that you recommend?
j

[BolexPlusx]

Unfortunately, that has become a more complicated question than it used to be. Kodak has recently axed their Kodachrome 40 stock, and there are acres of good cameras out there that are not easily used with the replacement 64T stock.

I think your best answers are going to be found here:

http://super8wiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

and here:

http://home.pacbell.net/mnyberg/super8mm/index.html

Among the things that have always been great about Super-8 are the challenges. For better or worse, the challenges have just ratcheted up a couple of notches!

[megalith6]

64T works in my Nizo S-800

K40 daylight rating ASA 25
64T daylight rating ASA 40

i'm not very technical, but that must be about a one f-stop correction on a camera designed for Kodachrome?

for low light conditions there is the Fujica ASA 200 Single 8 film - i used this inside a prehistoric chambered mound last August, with a modest, portable electric light source, and it did the business . . .

[img]graemlins/film.gif[/img]

ric