Revere 80 Cine Camera / Original Box & Papers and Alpex Exposure Meter

Description

Revere 80 Cine Camera / Original Box & Papers and Alpex Exposure Meter. Shipped with USPS Priority Mail.
Revere Model 80 8mm Film Projector
This is the Revere Model 80 Standard 8mm Film Projector. Revere Eight (model 80) 8mm Movie Camera w/13mm f1.9 Cine-Nikkor-Revere C, wrist strap, inst. manual, in case. Includes Revere 80 Camera, Instructions, Warranty and original box. Camera is in excellent condition though the lens looks like it could use a cleaning. The Warranty includes the serial number and is dated 2/25/1959!
History
This projector was manufactured by the Revere Camera Company, which was founded in 1939 in Chicago. It was originally created as a subsidiary company of a car radiator manufacturer, but eventually it was rolled back into the parent company and the overall focus was moved to the production of budget cameras and projectors throughout the 40s and 50s. The company was purchased by 3M in 1960.
The Model 80 appears to have been their first 8mm projector and it was manufactured in the early to mid 1940s. It was followed by Models 85 and 90 in the late 1940s and 50s.
I found I really appreciated the Model 80s austere and simplistic design, as all the switches and levers are up front and easily accessible and usable. If you know what you are doing, you can set it up, play the film, rewind and remove quite quickly.
It’s design is incredibly minimalistic–there is nothing included that is not functional. It really speaks to what a ‘budget’ product meant in 1940. It does not have any extra fancy features, but it is not at all ‘cheap’ in the modern usage of that word (ie. flimsy, disposable, poorly made). ‘Budget’ spoke more to the price and less to the quality of the item.
There were quite a few things about using this projector that really stood out to me. The first was that the actual size of the projected image is quite small compared to either a slide projector or a modern video projector. At a throw distance of twenty feet, the projected video was about the size of a 36" screen (three foot diagonal).
These days ‘rewinding’ is all but completely divorced from it’s root word. Nothing digital can be rewound–it can be reviewed and reversed, but as there is nothing to wind, there is nothing to rewind. Most people when they think about rewinding in the ‘old sense’ would think about VHS or cassette tapes. The 8mm projector brings a whole new level of meaning to re-winding. At the end of watching a film, all of the filmstrip will have unspooled from the top and will now be on the bottom reel. The problem is that it is now wound completely backwards, so in order to properly view it again, you have to re-wind it back on the original reel. In order to do this, you can directly attach the film to the upper reel without having to spool it through the lamp/lens area, and then you release the clutch and set it to reverse and the film will re-wind itself around the top reel. It’s a big enough leap from digital to remember a time when viewing a film left it in an unviewable state that you needed to reverse in order to view again. This goes a step beyond that as both VHS and cassette tapes had the advantage of containing both reels within their cases, and so the machine could easily rewind back and forth between the reels. With an 8mm projector, you have to do most of the work that those machines did. As well, if you only have the reel with the film on it, and not a second empty take up reel, you cannot properly view your film!
8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the filmstrip is eight millimeters wide. It exists in two main versions — the original standard 8 mm film, also known as regular 8 mm or Double 8 mm, and Super 8. Although both standard 8 mm and Super 8 are 8 mm wide, Super 8 has a larger image area because of its smaller and more widely spaced perforations.
Listing includes Revere 80 Camera, Instructions, Warranty and original box. Camera is in excellent condition though the lens looks like it could use a cleaning. The Warranty includes the serial number and is dated 2/25/1959!
Also comes with Alpex Clip On Exposure Meter, Case, and instructions. A detailed view and users guide is located on the website below.
The Chens: The User's Review: Alpex Clip On Exposure Meter (mailch.blogspot.com)