We first got word of a Gakken Single-8 movie camera kit in March 2008, in the form of some intriguing prototype pics (below). We also heard rumors that the company was uncertain about its release because of the limited amount of Fujifilm Single-8 movie film still available. Fuji produced a final production run of their R25N and RT200N color Single-8 films several years ago. They anticipated this inventory would be enough to meet user demand for 5 years. However, long-time Single-8 users could find themselves without Fuji-manufactured film sooner than anticipated if Gakken releases this camera.
We were understandably surprised when Francesco Fondi at HobbyMedia showed us a couple of images from the June 2008 Tokyo Toy Show that included the prototype camera on display. He followed up with Gakken, and confirmed that the company has plans to release the camera sometime next spring.
Gakken's Single-8 camera design is the essence of simplicity. The Single-8 cartridge format was Fujifilm's answer to Kodak's popular Super 8 design - both films share the same physical dimensions, although they come in differently shaped cartridges. This means that any Single-8 film can be projected using a Super 8 projector. The camera is powered by a single AA battery and accepts 15m film cartridges, which last 3 minutes when shooting at 18 frames per second. The viewfinder is a simple gun sight mechanism on the side panel and the lens aperture is set manually. There's no zoom and it doesn't record sound.
All in all, this is not an impressive cinematographic device - even by the standards of the mid 1960s. That said, it is the first newly designed 8mm camera in over two decades and I can't wait to get my hands on one!
related:
Gakken's Super 8 Projector Kit
Fuji Single-8 Movie Film Outruns The Grim Reaper
Movie Making With Fuji Single-8: Better than Kodak?




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. 