Ikonoskop readies new Super 8 "movie camera"
By Darren Murph 
posted February 6th 2007 3:33AM
posted February 6th 2007 3:33AM
Hot on the heels of Hasselblad's latest 31-megapixel monster, rumors of Canon introducing a 1DS Mark III, and the RED camcorder getting more real everyday comes news that Ikonoskop is looking to bust out the "first new Super 8 movie camera design in over 20 years." The Swedish firm is hoping to offer up a Double Super 8 version of its "compact and affordable A-Cam SP-16 Super 16-millimeter model," and will feature a good bit of similar attire such as the same interchangeable C-Mount lenses, parallel viewfinder, 100-foot film capacity, and "microprocessor-synchronized frame rates between 6- and 37.5-frames per second." The device would utilize a "hybrid" design to use "16-millimeter wide film to capture Super 8 sized frames," and although the company boasts about its numerous advantages, the "main downside is that relatively few film stocks are available in the format." Still, things aren't off and running just yet, as Leif Bystrom has announced that the outfit needs 25 eager customers to lay down a €1,000 ($1,301) deposit ensuring that at least that many will be sold for the €5,200 ($6,764) retail price. So if you need no more introduction to convince yourself that this bad boy is worth your while (and coin), send your down payment on in so we can see this thing materialize.[Via CNET]
I'm not sure why they bother, the cost of film processing is unbelievablely expensive these days - the unit looks nice though. Most people I know are doing small movies digitally and then editing them on a Mac. You can shoot more footage and the editing is easy too. Most people stuff (if they are lucky) shows on a TV screen / DVD. If you want it shown in a cinema you get the finished thing printed to 16mm film.
Film... How quaint...
"Most people I know are doing small movies digitally and then editing them on a Mac."
Yeah, and most of those films have the same generic look.
You are right that this is how most amateurs and small independents are working these days. But most amateurs and small independents are not very good filmmakers, and they probably wouldn't know the difference in look between film and video if they had an A/B comparison right in front of them.
There's a niche even in professional filmmaking for the Super 8 format. No, it's not like feature films are ever shot on Super 8, but a lot of music videos and avant-garde pieces are (even some major ones - many of Depeche Mode's Anton Corbin videos were shot on Super 8, for example, as were a couple of Madonna's fairly recent videos). You can sort of replicate that with computer effects these days, but it doesn't really look right, any more than the Photoshop "film grain" filter looks like real film for still photos.
Super 8's never going to regain the kind of popularity it had before the days of the camcorder, but I can't foresee a day when it doesn't fill that same pro niche, unless it's a forced obsolescence (this does happen in the film world, as there are only a couple of suppliers of both film stock and processing and if they decide to stop supplying something, well, that's pretty much it).
I take your point Jeff, I've got a few super 8 movies of my own, which I treasure ;-)
I guess film schools might be a market for this unit teaching people to use real film stock?
See, this makes me happy; as a photographer who literally grew up with black and white (my dad's a professional, he made me learn film). Theese kids these days (I'm only 21, but still) think that theyre the cats meow because they can make a movie, but it'll never be as good as it would if they fully understood photography as a medium.