Russian Reloadable Carts

[dogstarman]

I know this has been brought up in the past, but does anyone have any experience with these things?

In particular:

-How the heck are you supposed to load them so the film is tightly wound enough and it doesn't get mangled/ dirty in the process?
Are they a bitch to load/ unload?

-Does anyone have a source for them other than the Russian Cine Exchange or whatever it is?

-How do they set the film ASA? Do you have to do it manually?

Help is appreciated.


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[dogstarman]

I wanted to bump this back up tho the top, based on Pedro's recent post about bad K-40 and Kodak's willingness to scrap an entire filmstock because they had one bad batch...

I got this from the fellow that operates Russian Cine Equipment:

"If you know, Super 8 cameras can have auto mode speed film setting or manual
modr speed setting.
If you camera have few pins ( 5-6 pcs ) near film channel, it's camera have
auto mode film speed setting.
Cartridge have few cut, and push to it's pins. Pins connect contacts and
camera read film speed.
Reloadable film cartridges have cut for load speed 32 ASA.
If you load film with other speed to cartridge, you can make new cut on
cartridge or setup exsposure correction on camera.
I think, setup exposure correction best version. It's more simply.

Best regards
Olexandr."


And he provided me with a PICTORAL instruction manual that was pretty much useless because the images were so small.

Now then, I'm interested in these things because I did the math and you can purchase 100' spools of DS8 Fomapan100 from John Schwind for $15.00... that comes up to $3.75 per 50' of S8. I also found a place called Black & White Film Factory in Toronto, Canada that will process Fomapan for 9-cents a foot, so $4.50 a cartridge. I also go the processing sequence for the stock off of Fomas website. All in all, that comes out to $8.25 for 50' of filmstock and processing. All that is left is having a 8mm slitter to cut-down the stock and cartidges to load it into. And the Russian reloadables are the only practical thing I could come up with, unless someone knows where you could get a hold of used Kodak cartridges cheaply. Martin Baumgardner wants $9.00 or something close, and I understand thay can be a real pain to load. So, I'll ask again:

Has anybody ever used the Russian reloadables, or have a better alternative to them?



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