Kodak resurrects Super 8 • Hacker News Board

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#131

Post by valleyer » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 4:59 AM UTC

zachrose wrote: post #64

k-mcgrady wrote: post #39

Interesting. Today I've come across quite a few stories on analogue tech. This + new Technic SL-1200 models + new vinyl pressing machines being produced due to vinyl demand continuing to grow + record players and instant film cameras being incredibly popular on Amazon this Christmas. I wonder if we'll see this occur to other analogue tech too?

I call this the "letterpress phenomenon". Once upon a time the only way to get some text printed was to hire somebody to arrange lead type letter-by-letter and print your thing on a six-ton iron press. This required significant amounts of training to do well and still resulted in artifacts of the process, in this case slight debossing of the paper as the fibers were crushed between the press and the type. Then came p…

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#132

Post by lectrick » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:02 AM UTC

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #113

lectrick wrote: post #89

Is there an actual double-blind study that proves that digital still cannot beat analog in certain realms? Because I'm having a hard time believing that this "analogue renaissance" isn't just pure marketing hokum.

If nothing else, it's a stylistic choice. Choosing how a film should look, the colours and tonality etc, is a creative process and has aesthetic and therefore subjective goals. You can't really say which one is 'better', only that they're different.

Everything you described is at least theoretically digitizable.

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#133

Post by ghaff » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

purpled_haze wrote: post #105

n_plus_one wrote: post #60

Here's a nice solution in search of a problem.

I speculate that there is latent demand for it between older people that miss it and younger people that are tired of pure digital and want something more organic and different. Personally though, I would rather have something similar to analog that doesn't require the cost and time/complexity. I wonder how many folks will buy these to go with them: http://nofilmschool.com/2013/12/nolab-digital-super-8-cartri...

>younger people that are tired of pure digital and want something more organic and different

Which I actually sort of appreciate (in my less cynical moments). Though, if it's just that they've never shot anything on film, I'm sure they have friends or co-workers with old still cameras gathering dust. Borrow one, shoot a roll of film, send it off to be processed, and the urge will probably have gone away by the time you get your prints back. You can get those prints scanned too if you like.

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#134

Post by jdub » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:03 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #63

Amusingly, it's also a video camera, since the viewfinder is an LCD display. Not clear if the manual aperture and shutter time settings affect the viewfinder. You can feed video into the display (why?) but it's not clear if you can get video out of the camera. The film costs $50 to $75 per cartridge, for a running time of 3.5 minutes. Market: wannabe hipsters and old guys in the movie industry. Kodak makes movie film…

Also, the "viewfinder" is one of those (relatively speaking) huge panels that fold out from the side. Try doing that with a 100% analogue camera! I reckon it's a clever hybrid.

(Plus it has SD, USB, etc... but there's no documentation as to what they do. Maybe you can store lo-fi digital versions for rushes and offline pre-editing.)

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#135

Post by Animats » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:12 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #63

Amusingly, it's also a video camera, since the viewfinder is an LCD display. Not clear if the manual aperture and shutter time settings affect the viewfinder. You can feed video into the display (why?) but it's not clear if you can get video out of the camera. The film costs $50 to $75 per cartridge, for a running time of 3.5 minutes. Market: wannabe hipsters and old guys in the movie industry. Kodak makes movie film…

Amusing idea: conceal a flash chip in the film cartridge and record video to it from the camera used for the viewfinder. Put in a sound generator to make clicky film advance mechanism noises when taking pictures. The film in the cartridge is just a dummy and is not exposed. When the film cartridge is mailed in for processing, download the video, run it through Filmlook to give it grain and jitter, then upload to the cloud server. If the user orders the "return processed film" option, print the video to film stock at the processing plant.

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#136

Post by roborodent » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:47 AM UTC

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #123

acomjean wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kodachrome was slide film. Very few labs would process it, though the colors were bright and some people really liked it. E6 was the process that most slide film used (even some of kodaks). Slide film was always a challenge to expose just right, its dynamic range is pretty narrow compared to negative film. Its what you needed to use for movies though. I can't see this new revival being more than a niche market. Sendi…

Polaroid instant film is awesome and is not like Super 8 at all (except they're both old). There is nothing digital that works as well as Polaroid (or Fuji) instant film. No, carrying around a digital printer doesn't work as well, yet. Integrate the digital printer into the camera so that you don't notice the printer at all, then it will moot the instant film. This Super 8 thing just seems crazy. It's conspicuously a…

I'd say the Fuji instax SP1 works pretty damn well.

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#137

Post by rodgerd » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 7:03 AM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #119

SwellJoe wrote: post #111

I watched the analog-to-digital-to-analog trend happen in professional audio (I was going to school for audio as ProTools was beginning to be a thing, we worked on analog tape machines...but the year after I finished my degree, they brought in digital ADAT machines for the small labs, and eventually went digital in the 24 track room, as well). It's amusing how superstitious people can be, especially in industries tha…

Where there are limits, there is art.

99% of this is not people creating "better" (whatever that is) art. It is, if my experience with photography is any guide, people churning out the same crap everyone else does, while affecting a position of being somehow superior because they "aren't obsessed with the latest gear" - while being, in fact, vastly more obsessed with what equipment to use.

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#138

Post by rodgerd » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 7:06 AM UTC

drrotmos wrote: post #82

beamatronic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or unless you are Quentin Tarantino; see Inglorious Basterds (2009) to see what rich colors film can provide.

Or better yet, The Hateful Eight, in which he takes film to a new level, shooting on Ultra Panavision 70 (which perhaps counter-intuitively is 65 mm film). Other people are going digital, but Quentin Tarantino seems to be busy taking film to the next level instead :)

Pity it looks like shit if you don't live on the first-run circut, but I guess us peasants who don't happen to live in NY and LA only deserve scratched-up seconds.

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#139

Post by rodgerd » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 7:09 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #30

meric wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We weren't in the company. It can be hard to tell. You could open a beauty therapy shop, and it's revenue increase every year, and suddenly after the introduction of cheap laser treatments and race-to-the-bottom competitors, in one year you could face a reduction of 70% of your revenue.[1] [1] Anecdote.

Kodak certainly did a lot of things wrong--especially with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Part of their problem with digital was that they were arguably ahead of curve (and not quite on the right curve) with things like PhotoCD and providing equipment to photo shops to print customer photos. However, the bottom line is that it would probably have been very difficult for even the most brilliant management to replace…

> Fujifilm did end up doing OK by, among other things, applying their film making expertise to other industries like medical.

Another thing they did was carve out a very nice niche for themselves with their X-mount cameras. They've done quite well in part because the in-camera processing engine does a good job of emulating a lot of the old Fuji film stocks (as well as making very nice cameras that offer something different to the canokin mill).

Re: Kodak resurrects Super 8

#140

Post by bsder » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 7:14 AM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #120

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With photography, film and audio alike, it's easy to prove that digital has orders of magnitude more precision and accuracy. That's great, but it's not the whole picture. Mixing desks are said to colour the sound in certain ways, and in doing so, introduce harmonics and other sorts of imprecision that would be anathema to digital components, for which THD and SNR are paramount and utter precision is the ultimate goal…

I don't think anyone disputes that. The real question is, can a digital filter provide a close enough approximation of that colouring that going through the analogue path is no longer necessary? Are Instagram and Photoshop an adequate substitute for real life film grain? I say yes, but I'm a software guy. And I've had this argument with a serious pro audio engineer who has a Pro Tools workstation built around a Neve…

> the tracks each pass through their own DAC connected to this old-school analogue summing mixer, and then are re-recorded on the other side. It seems totally foreign to me

There was, at one point, good reason for doing this. Digital summing is really easy to get very wrong. ProTools used to introduce some really nasty artifacts back in the 16-bit days if you had non-linear effects.

24-bit chains have made a lot of this moot. And using 32-bit float as intermediate calculation steps makes even more of it moot. And, increased computer power ... etc.

Then there is the always present "Magic Box X adds tonal coloring that I like." You can't actually argue against this very well unless the box really doesn't do anything at all.