If you’ve always wanted to shoot video using the tools your parents probably used to film each other naked then Yves Behar and Kodak have a product for you. Super 8 was a cartridge-based film standard that became surprisingly popular after its release in 1965. It has remained popular with vintage film buffs and now Eastman Kodak is working on a $400 to $750 Super 8 camera for the modern auteur.
Behars designed the camera to look retro and boxy while cleaving to a more material design aesthetic.
The problem? Film is hard to get these days and even with the support of a Super 8 subculture it will be hard to see just who is going to produce this stuff profitably. Heck, the WSJ expects it to cost $50 just to process the stuff. However stranger things have happened – Holga, for example – and the market is a strange mistress.
“This is no longer the classic script of a war of digital versus analog,” Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke. “What it really is now is the complementary characteristics of both.”
The camera will have a digital viewfinder and filmmakers who send in their film for processing will automatically get a digital copy of their video.
