Choosing Super8 film camera (not just for wedding shoots)

Super8 series 

Choosing a Super8 camera - you’re reading this right now 

Shooting on Super8 camera (in preparation)

Developing and scanning the film (in preparation)

Why Super8

Filming on Super8 is great fun. The film is timeless, beautiful, amazing. Unlike digital, it’s real film stock: celluloid and some chemistry on it (which we don’t really understand :D). Shooting the material is just the beginning, everything still needs to be developed and then scanned. With colour negative it ends there, with black and white film you can also project everything onto the screen on an 8mm projector. Unfortunately, there are only 4 films in the e-shop offer: the Kodak 50D, 200T, 500T and B&W. About the films some other time.

Super8 cameras that you can use 

Note: beware of regular 8mm cameras, as they are quite complicated to use nowadays. Super8 is a cartridge format that Kodak developed for ease of use and sending to the lab. More info here.

There are 3 types of Super8 cameras: expensive, unusable and recommended. 

You can find a complete list of them here.

Expensive 

Cameras like Beaulieu, Leicina, Nico. Sometimes they have some extra gadget (like a picture up to the film hole), but they are sometimes hard to find and expensive too. Sometimes tricky (or nearly impossible) to repair. We won’t prolong the article with them. 

Unusable 

Cameras like Meopta, Bell & Howell and many others. Judging by the list, it seems that Super8 cameras were made by every toothbrush manufacturer in their day. Unnecessarily large, heavy (yet Super8 is the smallest format), with a sound module (which you don’t use today). Avoid them, they are a waste of money. 

Recommended 

Basically, there are only a few cameras that are worth using. You don’t want to waste your time, film stock and the time of the people you are filming. Proven cameras are these: 

Canon 310XL: zoom lens, f/1.0, really compact, lightweight (we used this one till 2022)

Canon 514XL: zoom lens, compact + focusing matrix (we use this one)

Canon 814/1014XL-S: even with the sound module, these are the most advanced cameras from Canon (including e.g. time lapse, multiple frames-per-second options), more expensive than 310/514XL.

Nikon R10: we haven’t tried it, but filmmakers often use it