8mm Forum: Canon 310xl with kodak 50D film

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Posted by Anna de Haas (Member # 6552) on August 04, 2018, 02:32 AM:

Hi everyone,

I am new to the 8mm world and although i did a lot of research already i still got lot of questions when it comes to my canon 310xl camera.

Does anyone have experience, tips and/or examples on using the kodak 50d film with the canon 310xl?

There is a lot of discussion about using 64t with the 310xl, but almost none about the daylight film (or i couldnt find it). Also there are a lot of different opinions on how the camera will read the film and about the notch ‘hacking’. Since it only reads daylight film 25/100/160 asa.(40/160/250 artificial)

Basically i got a little lost in all the information on the web, so any specific tips and tricks for this camera in combination with the 50d film is very welcome!

Posted by Steve Klare (Member # 12) on August 04, 2018, 08:03 AM:

Hi Anna,

I would think any camera capable of exposing 40ASA film would do just fine with 50D: that wouldn't use up a lot of exposure latitude. I used to expose 50ASA Plus-X in a 40ASA camera and it looked great.

The weird part is the internal filter. It's in there so tungsten balanced film can be exposed in daylight. With 50D you are ready for daylight right out of the box, so you want nothing to do with this filter!

It gets weird because of the way the controls are set up for these filters. They aren't marked "in or out" or "on or off" but usually something like a little sun and lightbulb symbol.

If you have these, you want "lightbulb" because that removes the filter for shooting tungsten film with tungsten light. Intuitively you'd want it to be the sun symbol, but we are way beyond the intuitive here!

There are also cameras that read a cartridge notch and do all this automatically: I've never had one like that so I can't say a lot about it, but one way or another that tungsten filter needs to go away.

Now, these don't have the filter for shooting daylight film with tungsten, so if you want to do this you'll need an external filter and mount it on the lens.

That daylight at 25ASA is actually because of the light loss through the tungsten filter and the wider aperture opening you'd need to compensate for it. If you remove that from the equation, if becomes 40ASA and you should do just fine

Posted by Rob Young. (Member # 131) on August 04, 2018, 08:19 AM:

Yes, Steve is correct. In the good old days, most film such as Kodachrome was tungsten balanced (3200K), so when filming in daylight (5600K), you would move the camera filter to the sun symbol for daylight.

This would engage a Wratten 85 orange filter to colour correct the tungsten film for daylight (basically give the film more orange to correct for cooler daylight and correct it from looking too blue).

When filming indoors or with lights, you would move the switch to the lightbulb setting, as in those days lamps were generally tungsten at 3200K.

Daylight balanced films do not require the Wratten 85, so, as Steve says, leave the switch on the light bulb, or indoor setting as the film is already daylight balanced and does not require the filter's colour correction.

If you film indoors with traditional halogen or tungsten lamps however, it would produce results which are too orange!

Again, as Steve points out, daylight film such as Ektachrome 100D benefit from the full 100 ASA speed in daylight, unlike old Kodachrome 40T which was actually only 40 ASA in tungsten and would reduce to 25 ASA when filming outdoors with the Wratten 85 filter engaged.

As 50D is slightly too fast for a camera set at 40 ASA, technically it will be a little overexposed, but I reckon the difference will be irrelevant.

Have fun!

[ August 04, 2018, 02:13 PM: Message edited by: Rob Young. ]

Posted by Anna de Haas (Member # 6552) on August 04, 2018, 01:53 PM:

Thank you both for the fast and very helpful replies!

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