The Bell & Howell Filmo camera was ready for sale December 1923. The first 16-mm. camera and projector available were by Alexander Victor of Davenport in August 1923. http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/msc/tomsc200/msc153/smpte.htm
The Ciné-Kodak got out in 1924.
The whole 16-mm. safety film project was developed by Bell & Howell Co. http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Products/Production/Spotlight_on_16/Why_16_mm/newWave.htm
Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-23-2013, 09:11 AM:
"A joint venture..." ; "...EK and B & H agreed to...". Apologies: forgot that the launch range of 16mm cameras wasn't EK-badged. However, the essential point still stands: EK never were primarily in the business of making and selling consumer (or professional, for that matter) hardware. When they had to market their own badged hardware in order to support their new film formats (e.g. 16mm and Super 8 for moving image, or 110 and 126 for still), it was actually made by others. B & H weren't going to launch 16mm hardware on their own: it had to be a joint venture, presumably with EK offering some sort of minimum sales guarantee or other contractual provision to limit the risk to B & H (must look at my copy of Alan Kattelle's book when I can next get my hands on it - he would say if this was the case). The Eastman line of theatrical 16mm projectors (were they actually made at Kodak Park?) seems to be the exception which proves that general rule.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 11-23-2013, 11:37 AM:
Who made the Kodak silent studio 16mm camera the model R
Posted by Steve Matz (Member # 1890) on 11-23-2013, 11:37 AM:
I also wondered why back in the day that the 17.5mm format didn't become what 16mm did.Slicing 35mm film in half would have seen more viable and less costly than having to mfg a new type film stock with a different perforation design.the frame would have been larger than 16mm and should of produced a superior quality image.
I knew super 16mm wasn't going to last; standard 16mm had been out too long and adapted to television and the AV field for decades but 17.5 was back far enough that it should have been the std....
BTW: Does anybody up here have anything 17.5 related? I'm not even sure what companies made projectors for the format. I wish that it would have become the standard rather than 16mm,even though I have a library of 16 myself...
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 11-23-2013, 02:07 PM:
16mm was chosen to make it un-attractive to slit 35mm nitrate film into a home market
Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 11-24-2013, 10:41 AM:
Super 16 was/is an acquisition format only. You don't make Super 16mm prints except work prints and answer prints as part of the post production process (probably all gone over to digital post by now). Not sure what you mean by "wouldn't last." Super 16 may outlast regular 16.
17.5mm did exist in the form of full coat mag for sound mixing. It was run at the 90 fpm rate like 35mm locked to 16mm. Greatly improved sound quality but obviously less costly.
Posted by Simon Wyss (Member # 6218) on 11-24-2013, 03:03 PM:
Split film (17.5 mm) was already used at the turn of the century. Later in WWI it was revived by Bell & Howell.
Charles Pathé and George Eastman agreed after WWI that only safety film should be given to the homes, the then giant sleeping market. In 1919 Eastman-Kodak and BH startet the 5/8" film gauge project. 16 mm became a parallel designation and took over in right only when the European players joined the game.
The Ciné-Kodak K was made by the EKC. EKC also made lenses at the Hawkeye Works they owned. The Chicago gang around Bell & Howell Co. had a deep grip on the business. It got narrowed by the loss of the professional studio camera field to the Mitchell Corp. but the reaction was well prepared. BH could actually play with many conceptual possibilities from the basic design of the motion-picture camera they had. In 1912 it was at hand, the first all-metal camera, model 2709. The Autoload, the Filmo, the Eyemo, each and every model goes back to it.
With the projectors BH first followed the general layout of both reels in front of the body, example Filmo. When it was decided to build a sound projector they rearranged the reels with one in front and one at the rear of the body, the film undergoing the lamp house. That design remained unaltered with portable 16-mm. film projectors from the first Filmosound of 1934 until today.
I always wondered why Kern of Aarau never entered the field of projection lenses for 35-mm. film.
Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 11-24-2013, 03:08 PM:
There have been a number of 17.5 mm formats over the years. There were several such formats, both edge and centre perforated, within a few years of the introduction of 35 mm film. All were silent of course.
web page
The Pathe Rural format lasted long enough to gain a sound track. This was quite an interesting format, and the only 17.5 mm one which I have actually seen projected. The perforations were smaller than those on 16 mm, and fitted between the rounded corners of the frames; this enabled a considerably larger frame size than on 16 mm. If the format had lasted long enough for a modern projector to be developed for it, say a 17.5 mm Kinoton xenon machine, it should have been quite impressive.
The 17.5 mm magnetic stock which Steve K used to be readily available in London.
17.5 mm was also there in the earliest days of public broadcast television; the Baird Intermediate Film system, briefly used by the BBC in 1936, used a film of this gauge.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 11-24-2013, 04:45 PM:
who made the eastman cinespecial II and the studio camera
Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 11-24-2013, 09:28 PM:
There's an interesting postscript to the 17.5mm story. By the outbreak of WWII, it was in relatively widespread use (under the 'Pathé-Rural' badge, as Stephen notes) in France, but pretty much nowhere else. As a result, anti-Nazi propaganda films began to be distributed on the format when the French film industry came under occupation (as a sidebar, Henri-Georges 'The Wages of Fear' Clouzot's refusal to participate in resistance-related filmmaking was part of the reason for him being ostracised from the French film industry in the aftermath of the war, and being accused of pro-Nazi sympathies by some to this day), in response to which the German occupying forces were given orders to remove every projector and other 17.5mm-related piece of hardware they could find out of circulation and destroy it.
There are snippets of information and references to this in various history books dealing with French and German cinema during the war, but AFAIK no-one has yet researched and written up the whole story. Doing this would probably need some hard core research in the Cinémathèque Française, the Bundesarchiv and the Berlin film museum, and neither my language skills nor the location of my new home make this a really viable project for me; but I'm hoping that a Europe-based historian will do it at some point.
The same thing happened in reverse in China in the '70s with the 8.75mm gauge. The French Resistance used a non-standard format in an attempt to screen material that the authorities would not allow: in China, the authorities themselves used a non-standard format, software production for which they controlled completely, in order to prevent their citizens from viewing unauthorised material.
Posted by Simon Wyss (Member # 6218) on 11-25-2013, 12:52 PM:
For Gordon
http://www.nwmangum.com/Kodak/Rochester.html
Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 07-09-2019, 10:17 AM:
It has been 2051 days since the last post.
Posted by Michael Cleveland (Member # 10931) on 07-09-2019, 10:17 AM:
The answer to this has been touched on, but here's a little more detail. Eastman was never primarily in the business of making cameras and film equipment. Their equipment manufacturing was secondary to film manufacturing, and always pursued as a way to increase the demand for film by providing more vehicles for it. When W.K.L. Dickson first requested samples of 35mm wide film from Eastman for his motion picture experiments for Edison, the company was still young, making wooden box and folding cameras. By the time Kodak began making precision movie cameras and projectors for the amateur, they were already the world's largest supplier of motion picture film, so they had no need to go into the business of manufacturing projectors or cameras. When they did set out to create an amateur market for motion picture film in the early 1920's, they invited Victor and Bell & Howell into the fold to make equipment for the new 16mm film format, and when they joined in the establishment (as a silent but very prime mover) the Amateur Cine League and its monthly magazine, they voluntarily shared prime center fold and back cover advertising space, first with Bell & Howell, and eventually, others. The more cameras that were sold by anyone, the greater the market for Eastman film products. They would never have manufactured anything like a theater projector because it wouldn't have increased their film sales. The projectors they did make were corollary to amateur camera sales, to provide full equipage and service for the amateur film market.
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-09-2019, 11:39 AM:
I think that Michael's post pretty much answers the question.
Eastman's primary innovation was the ability to manufacture long rolls of film on a flexible base. The original Kodak box camera made use of this by making it possible for amateurs to take pictures with a small, simple camera without needing to learn how to do darkroom work or even load film holders. As a result, people could carry cameras with them on vacation and to events like weddings and graduations, where a 4x5 or 8x10 camera with wet plates would be impractical. The camera was a significant innovation, but the purpose for it was to sell film and processing services.
Polaroid was this way, too. They made the cameras (and sold them at a loss) in order to sell the film. As amaetur cameras go, both Kodak's and Polaroid's offerings were generally pretty decent products.
One does sort of wonder where the Eastman 25 16mm projector came from, though. It's pretty much the Rolls-Royce of 16mm machines, possibly only surpassed by the Kinoton electronic projectors. It certainly fills a need, but I'm not sure how a 16mm sort-of cinema projector would help to sell more film. The Pageant 16mm portables would have been more practical for home and school use, and 35mm would be a better format for cinemas.
And, yes, I'm not sure what a Kodak 35mm projector would offer than the other manufacturers didn't do just as well.
Posted by Michael Cleveland (Member # 10931) on 07-09-2019, 04:31 PM:
I would also like to clear up some other misconceptions and myths addressed above. First, Eastman had a very successful European market for its amateur cine products, in part because it arrived there as a single source, though that didn't last long. It was never as large a market as they held in the US, largely because 9.5mm was similar in image size and more successful in Europe than in the US.
I've always wondered where the myth that Eastman farmed out its manufacturing of cameras came from, because it's not true. Eastman had extensive manufacturing capabilities. The Camera Works division was specifically an equipment manufacturing concern, and unless the farming out happened in much later years, beyond the scope of my research, Kodak has always made its own equipment. Kodak made the Cine-Special in house, as it had made all of its equipment prior (the Cine-Special was originally intended to be a custom built-to-order camera, but production was moved to the Camera Works as demand required the larger production facility). They even went so far as to purchase the Nagel Camera Works in Stuttgart to gain an equivalence in the eyes of the public with German camera engineering. Perhaps in later years they farmed things out, but I've found no evidence for that in my research.
There is some confusion about the 16mm vs 17.5mm question. John Capstaff developed the 16mm system for George Eastman. Capstaff experimented with a number of formats to determine the smallest that could be used to project an adequate image. One of the sizes he approached in his experiments was 1/4 the standard 35mm frame, i.e., the 17.5mm frame. 16mm was opted for because it offered the smallest size that produced a good projected image, thereby also achieving a greater savings in film cost, which was the ultimate purpose of the reversal processing system he developed. That it was also too small to make splitting 35mm Nitrate film an economical endeavor was a fortuitous and desirable side benefit. Eastman went to Fort Knox-like lengths to ensure that no nitrate film was ever cut into 16mm strips, but that was never an objective in setting the size of the format.
There are also some mis-statments of market appearance. The Cine-Kodak was first on the market in July 1923; Victor appeared in August of that year, and the first deliveries of B&H Filmo cameras took place in February or March of 1924. I haven't been able to narrow that one to any closer date.
Hope that will help to clarify. All of this will eventually appear in an encyclopedic history of 16mm, hopefully to be published on the 100th Anniversary of the format.
Posted by Simon Wyss (Member # 6218) on 07-15-2019, 01:56 AM:
It is always with great pleasure that I learn and happily correct myself. I have read somewhere that the Bell & Howell Co. delivered the first Filmo 70s in December 1923 but I can’t find the source any more.
The Kodak Reflex special has plastic gears in the mechanism, therefore running rather quietly. Some aspects of the camera lead me to the assumption of Maurer behind it. Maurer and Mitchell both brought a novel 16-mm. camera to the market in the fall of 1946. The Mitchell 16 Professional eats double-side perforated film. The Maurer takes regular and one-edge perforated stocks.
EKC had high-speed cameras which presumably were made by third parties.
In the case of the Ciné-Kodak Special I can imagine a cooperation with B. & H. suppliers (injection-mould parts, spring, mechanism). Its almost square turret is prepared for conversion to the C mount thread and that alteration was offered in the thirties. The C and D mounts seem to have been devised through the cooperation of B. & H. with Wollensak. It’s complicated.
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 07-15-2019, 09:11 AM:
Am looking for spare magazines and lens for my Kodak Reflex special or proper lens adapters
Posted by Michael Cleveland (Member # 10931) on 07-16-2019, 06:52 PM:
Pinning down the correct first date for Bell & Howell Filmos is difficult, in part because there was no paper advertising until 1925, so there are no company documents to help. Even the first instruction book was undated. Alan Katelle wrote an article in the magazine "16 Frames" back in the 1990's in which he stated that first deliveries were made in Feb 1923, but when approached a couple of years before he died, he couldn't remember his source. Photo-Era magazine has the best clues in Herbert McKay's articles and references, but even those are still indefinite; pretty much eliminating December and narrowing the probable time to Feb-Mar 1924. There are other clues that suggest that 1923 was too early, like the timing and resolution of the discussions between B&H and Kodak over camera ID markings on the film (which appeared on the first Filmo cameras). I'm still looking into the literature to try to narrow the date further, but Alan was a reliable historian; I'm sure he had a source he trusted, and what I have found supports the early 1924 date. The hunt continues.
I don't understand the reluctance to credit Kodak with manufacturing its own products. They had a huge camera production facility in the Camera Works division. Like most manufacturers, they probably purchased some parts from contract suppliers, but they produced the products in-house.