Super 8

I don't know what sparked my recent interest in cameras. I just bought some on eBay. Old ones. Some guy in New York was selling, and I'm sure they were just something he found in his the closet of his recently deceased or institutionalized grandpa, and didn't know what to do with.
Five old cameras with little to no description, no guarantees that any of them function. No minimum bid. I took a chance and put down $20 to get them. I figure if even one of them works, it was worth it.

Well, they work, all of them. But to get them working will take more than the $20 I put down for them. What I mean is, three are old Super 8s, the kind you'd see in old silent, too fast home videos from the 60's. The cartridges are still available from Kodak, but can be pretty pricey. Lucky for me there is a student discount, and you can take them to Walmart for development. A 50 ft. cartridges will produce just over 2½ minutes of footage at 24 fps. My camera's will do 18 fps, I don't know yet if they'll do 24. They didn't come with documentation. One of them is a Standard 8mm film camera, meaning it does reels instead of cartridges. Those are harder to come by, I haven't nailed down a place to get a reel yet. But I want to, because its really cool. You wind it up, then hold down a button to roll the film. And one of them is a still camera, basically an aperture and a box. Similar to the Holga or Diana I wanted to get. Difference is, this only takes 127 film, where the Holga or Diana would take 120. 127 isn't made by any major film manufacturers anymore, but there are a couple labs left in the world that make it. I've already ordered a roll, I'll post the results here.

I'm pretty excited about the Super 8s. I can get the film easy, I can get it developed for cheap, and I can digitize it for nothing. I found a program that will create an AVI file from Super 8 scans, all you need is a flatbed scanner, which I have access to.

So, expect film. I'll post them here whenever I can get something done.