A while ago…well, ok, 2 years ago, I bought a super-8 camera at a garage sale for $10. A Nikon Super-zoom 8. I had a 50ft roll of Kodachrome 40 to play around with, but the batteries were dated and the thing could do with a clean up. The Kodachrome ended up getting ruined when my fridge got flooded, so I never bothered to get it sent off for processing. You can see how it ended up [here], and my [previous post on super-8 here].
Now, to get this poor thing back in action, my shopping list has been as follows:
-Light Seal repair kit (From the ebay seller [interslice], easily the classiest ebay username ever.) – $20AUD-ish, including postage
-2 Wein-cell 1.35v batteries (ebay) – $20AUD-ish, including postage
-2 rolls of Ektachrome 64T ([nanolab]) – $55AUD, including postage
-Some AA batteries (local) – $10AUD-ish
-An Xacto knife (local) – $10AUD-ish
-Some turpentine (local) – about $5AUD for 1 liter
So around a $100 investment to get it off the ground and shoot 2 rolls of film. I’d intended to get the battery adapters, but at $30 a pop – and I need two – that’ll have to wait until I’m using the camera a lot more. The Wein-cell batteries last about a year in-camera, so should be plenty of time for me to play around. Just gotta wait for all of it to show up in the mail, and I’ll piece it together.
What’s interesting is that [Nanolab's film prices] are pretty damn good. You can buy from America, but the postage is such a killer that it’s hardly worth the extra wait. To make it economical you need to buy half a dozen cartridges at a time. Nanolab is in Australia, have a huge range, and their postage is just $7 for express on 1-3 rolls. Can’t beat that.
Oh yeah, I bought a digital camera. Just a crappy Kodak Easyshare P&S, but it works fine for just taking snaps. $96 at K-mart, cant really complain – so you’ll get to see photos of this whole process soon.