Super 8 film
small film format by Kodak
Super 8 mm film is a motion-picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement over the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format. The formal name for Super 8 is 8-mm Type S, distinguishing it from the older double-8 format, which is called 8-mm Type R. Unlike Super 35 (which is generally compatible with standard 35 mm equipment), the film stock used for Super 8 is not compatible with standard 8 mm film cameras.
The film is nominally 8 mm wide, the same as older formatted 8 mm film, but the dimensions of the rectangular sprocket hole perforations along one edge are smaller, which allows for a larger image area. The Super 8 standard also allocates the border opposite the perforations for a sound track which could be either magnetic or (on some packaged movies) optical.
Fujifilm released a competing system named Single-8, also in 1965, which used the same film, image frame, and perforation dimensions, but with a different film base and incompatible cartridge format. The Kodak Super 8 system was adopted by more manufacturers and proved to be the more popular home movie format until it was displaced by video camera and recorder systems.
Super 8 System
Starting in 1963, Kodak privately invited manufacturers of home movie equipment to inform them about a new 8 mm format under development. After Bell & Howell learned about it, they began developing cameras and projectors as the Earlybird project, despite incomplete details about the cartridge and film size.
Launched in May 1965 by Eastman Kodak at that year's International Photo Exposition, held simultaneously with the ongoing 1964 New York World's Fair, Super 8 film comes in plastic light-proof cartridges containing coaxial supply and take-up spools loaded with 50 feet (15 m) of film, with 72 frames per foot, for a nominal total of 3600 frames per film cartridge. This is enough film for 2.5 minutes at the professional motion picture standard of 24 frames per second, and for 3.33 minutes of continuous filming at 18 frames per second (upgraded from the 16 frames per second rate of standard 8 mm) for amateur use.
The public source identifies “Super 8 film” as small film format by Kodak. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Super, film and small.
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This entry incorporates text from “Super 8 film” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.