the first hand held, silent film camera was invented in the 1890s.
the first hand held, silent film camera was invented in the 1890s.
when was the first hand held, silent film camera invented?
1890s
the first silent film era movie cameras that could be carried by the cameraman were bulky and not very practical to simultaneously support, aim, and crank by hand, yet they were sometimes used in that way by pioneering filmmakers. in the 1890s, brothers auguste and louis lumière developed the fairly compact cinematograph which could be mounted on a tripod or carried by the cameraman, and it also served as the film projector. in 1908 with a hand-held lumière camera, wilbur wright was filmed flying his aircraft on the outskirts of paris. thomas edison developed a portable film camera in 1896. polish inventor kazimierz prószyński first demonstrated a hand-held film camera in 1898 but it was not reliable.
hand-held camera
bullet::::- mitchell standard 35mm camera - the original mitchell rackover pin-registered studio camera, introduced in 1920 as a hand-cranked silent film camera. (the rackover device allowed the camera portion with its side-mounted viewfinder to be "racked over" upon its base by turning a handle on the rear of the camera base. by racking to the right, the operator would focus the lens upon a ground glass element seen through the viewfinder. by racking back to the left, the camera with its film would be brought into position to record the view of the now focused lens. this standard model came with a 4-lens turret, a matte box on rails mounted to the front of the camera, and options included a veeder film footage counter, behind the lens iris, 4-way adjustable frame mattes, automatic or hand dissolve, internal matte disk with 9 pre-cut mattes including 1/2 frame, circles, keyhole, binocular, and oval. various improvements and available options on this model took place over subsequent years, including a frames-per-second film speed meter, addition of a side-view parallax finder with upright view, various electric motors including variable speed, constant speed, and synchronized motors. the talking pictures introduced in 1926 soon required this somewhat noisy camera to run quieter with the so-called "silent" film movements, and soon thereafter a higher-speed "silent" movement and follow-focus devices were made available.
mitchell camera