Braun Nizo 801

Niezoldi and Krämer was founded in Munich in 1925, and Nizo is short for the firm's name. Braun bought the firm in 1962 and kept the name, which is the moment these cameras enter Braun's design culture. Dieter Rams ran design at Braun from 1961. German Wikipedia names Richard Fischer and Robert Oberheim alongside him as the designers who shaped the Nizo cameras, and Wright's auction catalogue attributes the 801 to Oberheim specifically, dated 1975. The 801 has the longest lens of three related models, the 481, the 561 and the 801, and Braun printed one manual for the macro versions of all three. They share their controls and differ mainly in the lens: 8 to 48mm on the 481, 7 to 56mm on the 561, 7 to 80mm here. What the camera is actually about is the shutter. It is a variable sector shutter, continuously adjustable from 150 degrees to fully closed, worked by a lever on the base. That gives you fades done by hand, a shorter exposure per frame for bright light, and an automatic lap dissolve that fades out over 63 frames, about three and a half seconds, winds the film back and fades the next shot in over the same frames. One story that is worth telling because it is verifiable and slightly absurd: at Wright's Dieter Rams sale in July 2018, a Nizo 801 with its case, stand and manual carried an estimate of 150 to 200 dollars and sold for 1,750. That is the design market rather than the film market, but it is a real result. The end came quickly. Niezoldi and Krämer and Braun's flash production were sold in 1980 to Eugen Bauer of Stuttgart. Production stopped in 1982, about 500 people lost their jobs and the Munich plant closed.

Deliberate, controlled shooting. The variable shutter is the headline: hand-worked fades and a shorter exposure per frame for bright light. An eleven-times zoom from a wide 7mm to 80mm, at f/1.8. Time-lapse and animation. Stepless intervals from six frames a second down to one frame a minute, single frame, and an automatic long-exposure mode, metered by its own cell, of up to a minute a frame for poor light. In-camera lap dissolves of 63 frames, done by the camera's own backwind. A real manual aperture and a split-image rangefinder, so it does not fight you. Tripod work: a cable release and an electric remote socket. Where it falls short: silent only, so sync work needs an external recorder fed by the pulse socket. No macro at all on the plain 801; if macro matters you want the 801 macro. About 1.4 to 1.5 kilos in a long body, so not a run-and-gun camera. The meter tops out at 160 ASA tungsten and 100 ASA daylight, which is the real constraint with modern stock. There is no film-speed dial as made, so you cannot simply dial around a misread notch unless the camera has been modified.

First look at the lap-dissolve indicator. Braun's manual says it shows R on black when a dissolve is set and 0 on white in the normal position. If a cartridge binds during the dissolve rewind, the manual's cure is to cut the power, pull the cartridge out about a centimetre, restore the power so the dissolve programme can finish, then push the cartridge back and shoot no more dissolves on that roll. Then the cells: six AA for the drive, in a box that springs out of the handgrip, plus two button cells for the meter in a chamber in the base, reached by swinging the handgrip away. Look into both with a light. White or green bloom, crusted springs, green creep along the wires leaving the chamber. Creep that has reached the loom is the expensive kind.

The super8wiki puts intermittent metering on the 801 macro down to poor contact in the meter battery compartment, or oxidation on the inside of the meter battery cover, and suggests cleaning the cover thoroughly with a fibreglass pen. It also suggests crumpled aluminium foil in the compartment before the cells. If that helps, the contact is the problem, and a clean contact is the lasting cure.

Different problem. The meter wants two 1.35 volt mercury cells, and those were withdrawn from sale in Europe and the US in the 1990s. Two modern 1.5 volt cells that fit the hole give three volts where it expects 2.7, and it will read wrong; alkalines also drift as they drain. Braun's own battery test catches it: a needle left of the red 8 means unsuitable cells. That is not a fault of the camera. An owner on Photrio reports that the meter needle drives the iris, so a meter problem here is more than a metering problem.

Run it at 18, at 24 and at 54 on fresh cells. If they all sound the same, the speed selection is not working, and that is a job for a technician.

Cycle every single switch, several times. All the speeds, the interval settings, the zoom rocker, the filter switch and the R control. Intermittents that improve as you work them point to dirty contacts. Things that never wake up point elsewhere.

It cannot read 500T at all. On a Super 8 cartridge the speed notch gets longer as the film gets faster, and a camera can only read as far as its sensing pin reaches. Braun's manual gives the 801's range as 16 to 160 ASA tungsten and 10 to 100 ASA daylight, so anything faster is exposed as if it sat at that ceiling: 500T metered as 160 comes out about one and two-thirds stops over. This is the design, not a fault. Re:Voir sells 801 macros with its own film-speed dial added as a modification; otherwise, with 500T, set the aperture by hand from a handheld meter.

Look at it in raking light for scratches before you pay for one.

Tired batteries, a cartridge that will not run and a meter that cannot read the film's speed can all look like a broken Super 8 camera. How to rule each one out is written once, for every model, in Super 8: before you blame the camera. What follows is specific to this one.

We used to list perished foam here as a leading fault. That overstated it. A Super 8 cartridge is a largely light-tight plastic shell with its own pressure plate — the film is never threaded through the camera — so the door foam is not doing the job it does on an open-spool 16mm camera. It still perishes.

Switch contacts that have sat for decades blacken. Dead or intermittent running, a missing frame rate or an unresponsive zoom can all start there. The documented case on this family is the meter: super8wiki traces intermittent metering on the 801 macro to the battery compartment contacts and the inside of the meter battery cover. Cleaning accessible contacts and exercising switches is within reach at home; anything inside the switch bank is a technician's job. The prevention is free: work all the controls regularly, including the ones you never use.

The meter needs two 1.35 volt mercury cells, 2.7 volts in total, and those were withdrawn from sale in Europe and the US in the 1990s. Modern alkaline 625-size cells give 1.5 volts each and the meter reads wrong. Braun's manual has a test for it: with the main switch on the red dot, press the button in the aperture knob and the needle should sit on the red 8. More than a needle's width to the right means fresh cells are due; left of the 8 means unsuitable cells, such as 1.5 volt ones. Three fixes, in ascending order. Zinc-air cells at 1.4 volts, such as the 675 size with a centring sleeve, come close to the original voltage, but they dry out within months once the tab is pulled. A voltage-reducing adapter lets a modern silver-oxide cell be used. The most permanent answer is an internal 2.7 volt regulator in place of the button cells: digitalsuper8.com publishes a build around an LM317 set to 2.7 volts, and the same site later offered it as a small circuit board. Whoever fits one must take out any remaining 625 cells. Worth knowing: the Nizo Professional does not have this problem at all. Braun already powered its meter from the AA cells.

The drive cells sit in a removable safety box inside the handgrip, and Braun designed that box specifically to keep leaking electrolyte off the camera's own contacts. So leakage from the drive cells should stay in the box, which is a separate part. Check the chamber the box sits in before you assume the worst. Braun also sold a six-cell nickel-cadmium box for the grip. Any original one is now about fifty years old, so plan on AA cells.

Braun's manual for the macro versions settles an old confusion, and super8.tv gives the plain 801 the same frame rates and through-the-lens metering. The normal automatic exposure is a CdS meter measuring through the lens. The automatic long-exposure mode uses a second cell behind the window under the nameplate on the front of the camera, reading a 90 degree angle, so that small lights in the picture do not dominate. Keep that window uncovered. The manual also settles the frame rates: 18, 24 and 54 frames a second, plus single frames and intervals from 6 frames a second to one a minute.