Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Eastman 350

This is topic Eastman 350 in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=008193

Posted by Jim Latendorf (Member # 3425) on 08-08-2006, 11:49 AM:

The Eastman model 350.
Anyone ever used one of these gems ?? Where they made in any quanity ?
Wish could find one of these machines to play with. A very interesting 16mm telecine machine.

NO shutter or Intermittent pulldown.
Done with mirrors for 100% light output.

Here is the brochure scanned in "PDF" format. Check it out.

ftp://jimhome.hopto.org/pub/16mm_projectors/eastman_350.pdf

Regards to all,
Jim L.

Posted by Christopher Seo (Member # 7) on 08-08-2006, 04:30 PM:

Very interesting. I wonder how similar the Eastman 350 is to the Mechau Arcadia projector, which was built for standard 35mm and also used rotating mirrors. The Mechau Arcadia was originally built for theatrical use (in Germany) but apparently many units ended up in telecine service after World War II.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 08-09-2006, 02:04 AM:

There were a number of continuous projectors using mirror systems; the Mechau was probably the best known, but there were others going back at least to the '20s. None were very widely used.

The BBC used the Mechau for telecine at one time, and also did basically the same thing in reverse for film recording. This continued into the early '50s. The BBC recently released a 3 DVD set of everything that survives of 'Quatermass'. It seems that, so far as anyone can tell, of the first series only the first two episodes were ever recorded, but these were done on a Mechau, so it is possible to see what the results looked like. The second series was recorded on a suppressed field recorder, and the third one on a stored field recorder, so it is possible to see the results from three generations of recording equipment.

There's a picture of the Mechau recorders towards the bottom of this web page , and a frame of the main titles from the output can be seen just above. The results on the DVD actually look rather better than this frame does. There was a considerable improvement in each generation of equipment, though the vertical resolution of the supressed field recorder is somewhat lacking; British television in those days was only 405 lines, so discarding half of them was not really a good idea. I need to try to find some examples from partially stored field and fast pull down recorders.

Moving into the colour era, some of the best 16mm transfers I saw were from the Rank 'Laserscan' system.

Unfortunately, not much early television equipment seems to have been preserved.

Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 08-09-2006, 04:04 PM:

quote:
There's a picture of the Mechau recorders towards the bottom of this web page ,

Yep, there's the hand cranks! I always wanted to see one of these projectors (outside of a photograph, that is).