Beaulieu Mar8 shutter speeds?

[milesandjules]

Hi Guys
Just grabbed a standard 8 Beaulieu of ebay with a nice looking Angenieux 7.5-35. The camera is either a mcr8....or a ..reflex 8g....it says different things on both the camera and the Hungarian instruction manual.

Any way just wanting to confirm shutter speeds so I can use an external light meter. ps...I love how quiet this camera is to wind up...compared to canon anyway.

12fps - 1/40th
18fps - 1/65
24fps - 1/85
48fps - 1/175
64fps - 1/240th
This look right?
thanks guys
M&J

[Oilman930]

The shutter speeds that you posted are correct.

The MCR 8 has a Gossen light meter built into the camera, but uses manual diaphragming control system. The MAR 8 also has a built in meter, but uses an automatic diaphragming control system. If your camera has a photocell housing attached to the body below the lens, then the camera is a MAR 8 or MAR 8G. If your camera just has the built in meter then the camera is a MCR 8. Just to confuse you even more, before the MCR 8, there was the MR 8 that also had a built in Gossen meter. It's just the early version of the camera with the built in meter.

Enjoy your new camera!

[milesandjules]

Thanks mate Yeah this one has the gossen on the back..it doesnt work though...I checked it with proper mercury batteries...yep going to shoot some fuji color neg on it. Will post a link when its up. Go film!

[Charlie Blackfield]

I can't help you with this particular model, but having just looked up the shutter speeds of my Pro8 Beaulieu 4008, it looks like it's pretty much the same. I couldn't find anything definite about the shutter angle, but would say that it represents a shutter angle of around 100 degrees - quite narrow, so you'd have to adjust for it when using an external light meter.

Charlie

[cameratech]

So it's an MCR 8 (or MR 8 G) - one of the best Standard 8 cameras I've come across. The variable shutter is the same guillotine type as the later S8 4008s, with a smaller effective shutter angle than most Standard 8s. The Angenieux zoom is nice, but for even better results give it a spin with good D-mount primes.

I'm much less keen on the MAR 8 with the automatic diaphragm - you can't exchange the lens and the iris is (like so many auto irises) an ugly 2 blade thing. Yours is much better.

The weakness with these cameras seems to be the winding lever - the mechanism that allows the lever to spin freely in one direction and wind in the other is not as robust as it should be. I've seen a few that were broken.

Did you source the double 8 Fuji negative from Edward Nowill in the UK?

[Oilman930]

The lenses on the MAR 8 can be changed, but the lens mount was not very common so you didn't have a lot of choices of lenses. Angenieux put out a line of lenses for the Lens mount on the MAR 8.

The one problem you can't get around on the MAR 8 is the battery for the automatic exposure system. The battery is a rechargeable type that lasted 10 hours between charges. Only problem is, that was 50 years ago when the camera was new. Today these batteries are long since dead and could only be changed by sending the camera back to Beaulieu. Any MAR 8 you find today will have a non operational automatic exposure system. There is a manual adjust of the exposure so you can still use the camera.

The MAR 8 only lasted a year before being upgraded to the MAR 8 g. The photocell was changed slightly, but even better was the battery to power the auto exposure system could be user changed. Just a PX13 battery.

The MAR 8 g along with the MCR 8 remained in production until November 1964 when Beaulieu shut down production of 8mm cameras to change over to Super 8.