KODAK SUPER 8 - - THE DIGITAL ANALOG HYBRID CAMERA
The New Super Eight Camera from Kodak: A Hybrid Approach to Film Photography
Kodak's latest innovation in film photography is the introduction of a new Super Eight camera, marking a significant departure from their digital-centric approach. This move is seen as a nod to the company's rich analog heritage and a response to the changing needs of filmmakers and photographers.
For those who may not be familiar with Super Eight, it is a niche format that has been used by filmmakers for its unique aesthetic qualities and versatility. However, one major drawback is the high cost associated with shooting and processing this film. Kodak's new approach aims to make this process more accessible and affordable.
The Super Eight camera uses proprietary cartridges that can be purchased for $50 to $75. This may seem expensive at first, but what's important to note is that these cartridges are part of a hybrid ecosystem that also includes scanning and processing services offered by Kodak. Once you've shot your film using the Super Eight camera, you simply send it back to Kodak, where they will process and digitize it for you.
This approach has several benefits. Firstly, it eliminates the need for photographers to invest in expensive equipment or learn the complexities of film development. With Kodak handling the processing and scanning, photographers can focus on creating their art without worrying about the technical aspects. Secondly, this model provides a convenient way for filmmakers to access high-quality footage without having to invest in expensive camera systems.
The Super Eight camera itself is an interesting device that combines traditional analog technology with modern digital capabilities. While it may not be as feature-rich as some of the other cameras on the market, its unique aesthetic and versatility make it an attractive option for those looking to experiment with film photography.
One key aspect of Kodak's new approach is the scanning process itself. While details about the scanning specs are still unknown at this point, one thing is clear: Kodak is committed to delivering high-quality digital copies of their customers' film. This will be essential for filmmakers who want to use Super Eight footage in post-production.
The future of this hybrid ecosystem is also promising. Kodak has announced plans to introduce more cameras that can shoot both film and digital simultaneously, making it easier than ever for photographers to switch between the two mediums. Additionally, the company is interested in exploring new camera models that will allow customers to take advantage of this technology on a more regular basis.
For those who have followed the rise and fall of photography labs over the years, Kodak's approach may seem like a breath of fresh air. The proliferation of online scanning services has made it easier than ever for photographers to digitize their film, but there are still many who prefer to outsource this process to a professional lab.
Kodak's Super Eight camera represents a return to this traditional model, where the photographer sends their film directly to the lab and receives high-quality digital copies back. This approach may not be as convenient or cost-effective for every photographer, but it offers a level of quality control and craftsmanship that is hard to replicate with DIY scanning.
Ultimately, Kodak's decision to introduce the Super Eight camera marks an interesting shift in their product line. By embracing their analog roots and offering a hybrid approach to film photography, they are poised to attract a new generation of photographers who value both the artistic qualities of film and the convenience of digital technology.
As we look forward to the fall of 2016, it will be exciting to see how this technology takes shape and how photographers respond to Kodak's innovative approach. Will the Super Eight camera become a staple in every filmmaker's toolkit? Only time will tell, but one thing is clear: Kodak has taken an important step towards re-establishing itself as a major player in the film photography market.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show this is one of those points in the year we start getting a lot of announcements from camera manufacturers about equipment they're going to be releasing in the next year and there's been a lot of announcements this week already the one that was the most surprising to me was actually kodak's announcement that they are going to be releasing a super eight movie camera and this is particularly interesting because as many of you know Kodak have had trouble in recent years and they've tried to reorganize the company and they've gone in and out of bankruptcy and I think this is a really interesting move on kodak's part and I think it shows real change in what that company wants to do and also shows it embracing its film culture because what this is is it's a super eight camera that actually is a hybrid digital analog process and I want to explain that and talk about that some in this video so what they've actually announced with the Kodak Super8 camera is a camera that utilizes analog capture but has a lot of features that you would find on a digital camera for instance there's a 3 and 1/2 in swiveling digital viewfinder uh it's going to actually capture what it sees on Super8 film and so you're going to use cartridges for this much like you did in the old days and the cartridge each one contains 50 ft of film which depending on your frame rate is around 15 minutes of recording time there're going to be two lens options for this camera there's going to be a single fixed 6 mm Rico lens or you can get a zoom lens it's a 6 to 48 Rico there is a wheel-based user interface it has a built-in light meter uh cartridge detection um it also features exposure control you'll be able to manually adjust the speed and Iris settings and it's going to have USB charging for the battery now the frame rates on this camera are pretty interesting you can can select between 99 12 18 24 or 25 frames per second really you're going to be able to get the best footage at 24 or 25 since those are fairly standard however it does offer slower frame rates if you want to get more time on the cartridge and don't care as much about the visual quality and that's been pretty standard on Super Eight cameras for years now here's the interesting part when you buy a cartridge of film you're paying for the film but also the processing so what you're going to do is you'll actually shoot on the film and then you'll send it back to Kodak and they will process scan and what they're to deliver back is not only the movie roll of film so you could hook that up to an 8mm projector but also a digitized version and I think this is very key and what makes this particularly interesting um this is expected for release in the fall of 2016 and the camera prices are expected to be somewhere between 400 and 750 probably depending on what the lens options you want to get are and the film's going to be priced at $50 to $75 and I'm not sure what that range represents probably color versus black and white or maybe they're just not sure yet now there are a couple questions that I actually have about this camera and the first is really interesting is that it says it's going to support audio and if you've shot Super8 um you probably know that this is a feature that really hasn't been supported in Super Eight film for a long time basically it used a side of the strip of film to actually record the audio track on like it would an audio cassette and that's really kind of it's hard to find film that will do that anymore and nothing really supports it so that's something that's gone away so I don't know if the audio process is going to be captured in the camera digitally or how exactly that's going to work but I do find that pretty interesting so this is a particularly interesting move from Kodak I think for a number of reasons as I mentioned earlier um Kodak is a company that has had a lot of trouble in recent years they've been in and out of bankruptcy and they've never been able to really Embrace their place in the digital world and for them to turn around essentially embrace the analog roots that they're a big part of I think it's a big deal and this might actually work I think the Super Eight idea is very interesting this is a niche market that filmmakers still use but it's really expensive uh when you get into it I bought a camera several years ago that I wanted to start doing Super Eight on um mainly for b-roll and and films that I produce and for me it was really just too expensive once you get into scanning and it was just wasn't worth it for me so it's interesting to see Kodak picked this up now I mentioned earlier that the cartridges are $50 to $75 and what's what you need to understand about that is yes that does sound expensive but it's a lot cheaper than if you were going to go do it tomorrow and the fact that this is a process that's going to involve basically you pay for the cartridge and you've already paid for the processing so you're going to shoot send it back to them and they're going to digitize it and then send you your film back as well as a digital copy I think is very key now I will be interested to hear more about what the scanning is going to be like and what some of the specs are on likee that is it just a basic scan or is it going to be a 4K scan or what kind of format are you going to get back and that is important because super eight8 is a pretty low quality it's a very small piece of film and it does not natively shoot 16 by9 and so if you're going to use it in Film Production now you're probably going to need the capability to at least zoom in on that so I'll be interested to hear what Kodak um is going to tell us about what the scans are going to be like now having said that the final thing and I think this is really important and this isn't the first time that I've heard about this idea of kind of this hybrid ecosystem but codc are very interested in introducing more cameras down the line uh based on this type of technology and is somebody who's done a photography show for a while now um I've covered film quite a bit over the years and I have met a lot of people people through this show that love shooting film and in my experience there's basically two types of people who come to shoot film um there's the type that get totally into it they embrace the medium they love the fact that it's something tangible that they make with their hands and and the warmth and the analog qualities are something that they don't really get in the digital I mean there's there's a lot of reasons why but those people go really hardcore into this they start developing on their own film they really learn the process of it there's a second group of people that come at it for the same reasons but for whatever that is once it comes to learning how to process it yourself they'd rather send that to a lab they just it's too much to get involved with they're not comfortable working with the chemicals whatever reason that may be and we have seen The Disappearance of a lot of Photo Labs in recent years so that is becoming less commonplace and more difficult to do what's interesting is this model takes that concept and brings it into something on the consumer level so basically what you're going to be doing ideally from Kodak down the road is you could have a medium format camera or maybe a professional quality camera that could shoot both digital and film at the same time but I like that that model where you're going to send your film to them they'll do the processing and the scanning and save you that time and send it back and I think that that's particularly interesting to me and I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this takes and how photographers react to this and so I guess we'll find out more as we move towards the fall of 2016 but that is the new Super Eight camera that's been introduced by Kodak once again guys if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest stuff that we do here until the next video I'll see you laterwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show this is one of those points in the year we start getting a lot of announcements from camera manufacturers about equipment they're going to be releasing in the next year and there's been a lot of announcements this week already the one that was the most surprising to me was actually kodak's announcement that they are going to be releasing a super eight movie camera and this is particularly interesting because as many of you know Kodak have had trouble in recent years and they've tried to reorganize the company and they've gone in and out of bankruptcy and I think this is a really interesting move on kodak's part and I think it shows real change in what that company wants to do and also shows it embracing its film culture because what this is is it's a super eight camera that actually is a hybrid digital analog process and I want to explain that and talk about that some in this video so what they've actually announced with the Kodak Super8 camera is a camera that utilizes analog capture but has a lot of features that you would find on a digital camera for instance there's a 3 and 1/2 in swiveling digital viewfinder uh it's going to actually capture what it sees on Super8 film and so you're going to use cartridges for this much like you did in the old days and the cartridge each one contains 50 ft of film which depending on your frame rate is around 15 minutes of recording time there're going to be two lens options for this camera there's going to be a single fixed 6 mm Rico lens or you can get a zoom lens it's a 6 to 48 Rico there is a wheel-based user interface it has a built-in light meter uh cartridge detection um it also features exposure control you'll be able to manually adjust the speed and Iris settings and it's going to have USB charging for the battery now the frame rates on this camera are pretty interesting you can can select between 99 12 18 24 or 25 frames per second really you're going to be able to get the best footage at 24 or 25 since those are fairly standard however it does offer slower frame rates if you want to get more time on the cartridge and don't care as much about the visual quality and that's been pretty standard on Super Eight cameras for years now here's the interesting part when you buy a cartridge of film you're paying for the film but also the processing so what you're going to do is you'll actually shoot on the film and then you'll send it back to Kodak and they will process scan and what they're to deliver back is not only the movie roll of film so you could hook that up to an 8mm projector but also a digitized version and I think this is very key and what makes this particularly interesting um this is expected for release in the fall of 2016 and the camera prices are expected to be somewhere between 400 and 750 probably depending on what the lens options you want to get are and the film's going to be priced at $50 to $75 and I'm not sure what that range represents probably color versus black and white or maybe they're just not sure yet now there are a couple questions that I actually have about this camera and the first is really interesting is that it says it's going to support audio and if you've shot Super8 um you probably know that this is a feature that really hasn't been supported in Super Eight film for a long time basically it used a side of the strip of film to actually record the audio track on like it would an audio cassette and that's really kind of it's hard to find film that will do that anymore and nothing really supports it so that's something that's gone away so I don't know if the audio process is going to be captured in the camera digitally or how exactly that's going to work but I do find that pretty interesting so this is a particularly interesting move from Kodak I think for a number of reasons as I mentioned earlier um Kodak is a company that has had a lot of trouble in recent years they've been in and out of bankruptcy and they've never been able to really Embrace their place in the digital world and for them to turn around essentially embrace the analog roots that they're a big part of I think it's a big deal and this might actually work I think the Super Eight idea is very interesting this is a niche market that filmmakers still use but it's really expensive uh when you get into it I bought a camera several years ago that I wanted to start doing Super Eight on um mainly for b-roll and and films that I produce and for me it was really just too expensive once you get into scanning and it was just wasn't worth it for me so it's interesting to see Kodak picked this up now I mentioned earlier that the cartridges are $50 to $75 and what's what you need to understand about that is yes that does sound expensive but it's a lot cheaper than if you were going to go do it tomorrow and the fact that this is a process that's going to involve basically you pay for the cartridge and you've already paid for the processing so you're going to shoot send it back to them and they're going to digitize it and then send you your film back as well as a digital copy I think is very key now I will be interested to hear more about what the scanning is going to be like and what some of the specs are on likee that is it just a basic scan or is it going to be a 4K scan or what kind of format are you going to get back and that is important because super eight8 is a pretty low quality it's a very small piece of film and it does not natively shoot 16 by9 and so if you're going to use it in Film Production now you're probably going to need the capability to at least zoom in on that so I'll be interested to hear what Kodak um is going to tell us about what the scans are going to be like now having said that the final thing and I think this is really important and this isn't the first time that I've heard about this idea of kind of this hybrid ecosystem but codc are very interested in introducing more cameras down the line uh based on this type of technology and is somebody who's done a photography show for a while now um I've covered film quite a bit over the years and I have met a lot of people people through this show that love shooting film and in my experience there's basically two types of people who come to shoot film um there's the type that get totally into it they embrace the medium they love the fact that it's something tangible that they make with their hands and and the warmth and the analog qualities are something that they don't really get in the digital I mean there's there's a lot of reasons why but those people go really hardcore into this they start developing on their own film they really learn the process of it there's a second group of people that come at it for the same reasons but for whatever that is once it comes to learning how to process it yourself they'd rather send that to a lab they just it's too much to get involved with they're not comfortable working with the chemicals whatever reason that may be and we have seen The Disappearance of a lot of Photo Labs in recent years so that is becoming less commonplace and more difficult to do what's interesting is this model takes that concept and brings it into something on the consumer level so basically what you're going to be doing ideally from Kodak down the road is you could have a medium format camera or maybe a professional quality camera that could shoot both digital and film at the same time but I like that that model where you're going to send your film to them they'll do the processing and the scanning and save you that time and send it back and I think that that's particularly interesting to me and I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this takes and how photographers react to this and so I guess we'll find out more as we move towards the fall of 2016 but that is the new Super Eight camera that's been introduced by Kodak once again guys if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest stuff that we do here until the next video I'll see you later\n"