Beloved High-Speed Film Camera Faces Extinction | Raw File | Wired.com
►http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/08/hulcher-high-speed-cameras
For more than five decades, the Charles A. Hulcher Co. filled an important niche in the camera world. Their cameras, which shot up to 100 frames per second, were used to make photos of everything from Space Shuttle launches to Major League Baseball games.
But as digital cameras came to dominate, Hulcher saw business decline steeply, and today the company is down to just four employees.
Film cameras in general are headed the way of the dinosaur, but it’s a sad thing to have specialist cameras like these go away as well. There was a lot of craft in figuring out how to build these machines that directly transcribed light to chemicals, with no virtual intermediaries.
At one time, the camera shop on the Paramount lot (staffed by expatriate German camera makers!) could build any kind of camera to get any kind of shot. Now they get the standard rigs from PanaVision like anyone else.