This Swiss CD player costs more than a used car. The front panel features an analog VU meter and gob-smackingly expensive controls.
Award-winning cinematographer Carlo Piaget recently shot his 10-minute film Circus on a 1918 Bell & Howell 2709 camera once used by silent screen legend Charlie Chaplin. The project came about after a chance meeting with Chaplin's son Eugène, who also stars in the film.
"Circus opens in a foggy city as an agitated man is distracted by his mobile phone. He stumbles and finds himself pulled into a seemingly deserted circus. He glimpses a dancer, then a magician (Eugène Chaplin) hypnotises him via a spiral of zoetrope images. When the man wakes up, the circus has vanished but a circular mark on the ground and the music on his phone prove that his experience wasn’t a dream."
Before filming, Piaget painstakingly disassembled and restored the 90-year-old camera and located a set of vintage motion picture lenses. The unmodified camera had to be hand-cranked. Vintage silent films were usually shot at 16 frames per second, but Piaget chose the modern rate of 24 fps (although some scenes were shot slower for dramatic effect), requiring three rotations per second.
Rather than attempting to duplicate the distressed look of vintage film, Circus was carefully photographed on modern black & white Kodak negative film. It was then printed onto color stock with a range of monochromatic tints. The result is a modern re-imagining of silent-era cinematography.
At the end of the day, Piaget was impressed by the performance of the ancient Bell & Howell, “Others have shot films with old equipment, but with more or less modified cameras and newer lenses. This particular camera, the lenses and accessories are all 100% genuine. This little film is a love story between two objects of different ages and a good example of film’s universal compatibility.” [thanks, John Terendy!]
related:
For Sale: Charlie Chaplin's Movie Camera (another unrestored camera)
As you can see, the Da-Brite is a very simple editor. It's not intended that you' watch your whole movie on this device to make edit decisions (though I know masochistic editors who have). After all, there's no screen or even a shutter inside the viewer. Without a shutter the film just whizzes by your eye without conveying the illusion of images in motion. So you have to make your edit choices elsewhere - probably using a projector. Then you're ready to make your cuts with the Da-Brite.
WorkPrinter owners usually mate their equipment with a decent standard definition prosumer camcorder, but Matthew Greene has chosen to integrate the 
The threading is much simpler than most projectors, which makes me fear for the safety of any film I'd run through it. All of those extra gears and spindles that you see on larger projectors are there to take the strain off of the film as it runs through the projection path. Not the kind of thing I'd want to eliminate to reduce costs.
Marvelously Miniscule 35mm slide projector
The Cine-Kodak Eight featured a wind-up spring motor and a simple parallel viewfinder built into the handle on top of the case. Everything was completely manual -- you set the exposure by hand and fancy zoom lenses were still decades away. None of that mattered, because aspiring filmmakers suddenly had an affordable and compact camera to shoot home movies. It remained on the market until 1947.
There are lots of practical reasons to not have a bright red video camera (think of all the charging bulls it might attract!), but that doesn't mean that your editing equipment can't be! Let's look back some 50 years to Kalart's 8mm film editor - in bright red plastic! This is pretty daring - remember that photo equipment was almost always in serious gun-metal finishes, or dour black. What a great way to perk up the drudgery of editing your home movies!
The box promises that through editing you can transform your own films into polished "movieland" type productions with this simple device. The Kalart even goes so far as to simplify advancing and rewinding the film by just using one crank. Using a complicated internal mechanism, you use a single crank to move the film forwards and backwards. To be honest, I find the single crank thing more confusing than anything - and the gimmickry that makes it work isn't always the most reliable.
Several cameras - such as the Quarz 2x8 Super-3 above - did away with the cartridge completely and accepted Double Super 8 film on reels. Double Super 8 (DS8) is a hybrid format that uses 16mm wide film to
capture Super 8 sized frames. One half of the film is exposed, the
reels are flipped, and the other half is shot. The 16mm strip is cut
into two 8mm-wide reels after processing. It was a clever system.
The Bolex H16 is one of the most popular 16mm movie cameras ever made. The original H16 was introduced in 1935 and the modern spring-operated SBM model can still be purchased new. Bolex cameras remain extremely popular among film students and experimental filmmakers, because they're capable of capturing images that put sterile "High-Def" camcorders to shame. It's even possible to convert vintage cameras to shoot modern widescreen Super 16mm format. 
The Bell & Howell 2709 was a hand-cranked 35mm camera that
became the mainstay of Hollywood silent movie production upon its introduction
in 1911. In fact, nearly every major Hollywood production of the era was shot on a
2709 or its competitor, the Mitchell Standard. Unbelievably, this model
remained in production into the 1950s, although I suspect many of the
later units were used for animation purposes, rather than hand-cranked
live action.
