"Brian Gaff (Sofa)" wrote in message
...
I used to have one of those with a back projection screen etc. It did
switch between formats, but you did have two splicing blocks with it, one
for 8and the other super 8/single8, the latter having facilities for taped
splicing as well as solvent since Single 8 film was polyester. I'm not
sure what happened to that after I lost my sight to be honest, I assumed
nobody wanted cine stuff when video was all the rage.

I hadn't realised that the distinction between acetate base (which can be
spliced with cement that dissolves the base) and polyester (which can only
use tape because the cement doesn't dissolve it) was a distinction between
formats. I thought it was a difference between film manufacturers - Kodak
(acetate) versus Fuji (polyester). That means my dad must have bought or
borrowed a Single 8 camera (Super 8 film but in a completely different
cassette) before he bought the Super 8 camera that I remember. I'd assumed
that all Super 8 film (as in sprocket holes and frame sizes) was available
from a variety of manufacturers, but it looks from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-8 as if Super was Kodak and Single was
Fuji.

It's interesting looking at modern telecine scans of his Standard and Super
8 films from when I was little. The Standard 8 is definitely grainer (you
can almost count the grains! *) but the pictures appear sharper than the
Super 8 with a larger frame and therefore less optical magnification. I
wonder if it's due to the fact that a random noise pattern overlaid on a
slightly blurred picture can make it appear sharper. Or maybe the Nikon
Super 8 camera had a slight focussing error and the "infinity" setting of
the lens actually focussed "beyond infinity" or slightly closer than
infinity. I remember the mirror fell off the backing plate in my first 35 mm
SLR still camera, and after I'd glued it back on, there was a slight
focussing error so something that looked pin-sharp on the ground-glass
viewfinder screen was actually slightly out of focus on the film.


For ultimate grain-the-size-of-footballs, Ektachrome 160 (with normal
cassette-operated blue filter for use outdoors) was *very* much grainer than
Kodachrome 25. The last film my dad shot with the cine camera, before he got
an 8 mm video camera, he experimented with Ektachrome and low light or fast
motion (the ball on the "Swingball" that my sister and I were playing was
less blurred than it would have been with slower film and therefore longer
shutter speed.