Reinventing the Single 8 home movie format

Jenny List

Playlists: 'hackerhotel2024' videos starting here / audio

An engineer buys a camera in a second hand store, and finds herself bringing back a defunct film format.

When home movies on 8mm film were king, there was a format war between Kodak's Super 8 and Fuji's Single 8. Just like Sony's Betamax in the home video wars, Fuji's technically superior contender lost the battle, and the final Single 8 cartridges were manufactured in about 2010.

The physical dimensions of the film are the same though, so here in 2023 it should be possible to load a Single 8 camera with film from a Super 8 cartridge. This is the story of the revival and reinvention of a lost film format through OpenSCAD and 3D printing, done mostly without an original cartridge to copy.

Download

Embed

Share:

Tags