Canon 1014XL-S

In May 1979 Canon put a one-chip CPU inside a consumer cine camera — the first 8mm movie camera to have one — and gave it the first superimposed viewfinder display, which showed you information only when there was something to tell you. That is what made the rest possible: a programmable lap dissolve, a built-in intervalometer, a fade that closes the shutter and then switches the camera off by itself when it is finished. At 184,500 yen it was the most expensive Super 8 camera Canon made, and nothing dearer followed it. Canon's own museum calls it the pinnacle of its 8mm movie cameras. The timing is the story. Canon released this in May 1979. Its last 8mm film cameras appeared in 1982, production stopped in 1985, and in that same year Canon released what it describes as the world's first integrated 8mm video camcorder. Canon put a microprocessor into a film camera at precisely the moment it was building the thing that would make film cameras redundant, and then killed the line itself. It is still hunted. An f/1.4 ten-times zoom, a true 220 degree shutter, full manual with AE lock, slow motion, in-camera fades, a ninety-frame lap dissolve and an intervalometer is a feature list no modern Super 8 camera matches at any price. The honest counterweight, from people who shoot both: some prefer the 814XL-S, holding that it has the sharper lens and the better balance, and that the 1014 is nose-heavy with the longer zoom hanging off the front.

Low light. f/1.4 at the wide end with a 220 degree shutter is about as much light as Super 8 gathers, and it is the reason for the XL in the name. Effects that would otherwise be post: an automatic fade that stops the camera when it finishes, and a true lap dissolve that rewinds about ninety frames, picture and sound together. Very few Super 8 cameras dissolve at all. Time-lapse. A built-in intervalometer at one frame every 1, 5, 20 or 60 seconds, plus a remote socket, makes it a capable unattended camera. Slow motion around 36 frames a second on silent cartridges — a speed ramp with nothing done afterwards. Precise exposure: automatic with a seven-step compensation dial, AE lock for pans, full manual, and the aperture shown in the finder. Critical focus, with a split-image rangefinder and a dioptre range of -5 to +3, which matters enormously on a fast lens and a tiny frame. Macro at both ends of the zoom, and double-system sound through the pulse sync output, which still works perfectly with a modern recorder. Where it falls short: 2.1 kilos with batteries, and front-heavy. Noisy, which is irrelevant without sound and a real problem with it. No mechanical fallback on exposure — if the electronics die, manual dies too. The automatic film speed stops at ISO 400 tungsten, which does not reach modern 500T. Single-system sound is obsolete. 72mm filters are expensive. And there is a shrinking pool of people who will work on one.

Six fresh alkaline AAs, then run it at 18 frames a second without stopping. Not short bursts. If END appears with film nowhere near its end, or the transport ticks over one frame and stops, that is the drive gear and it is an expensive repair. Ask any seller for video of a continuous run.

It must stop instantly, every time.

Sweep the manual aperture control and watch the f/stop in the finder change and the blades move. Set automatic and pan bright to dark: the reading should track. Set AE lock and pan again: it must freeze.

Both ways, with the lock button held. Then load a daylight cartridge and confirm the filter cancels by itself.

Both speeds, both directions, full travel.

Run a fade and watch the shutter close and the camera stop itself in roughly five seconds at 18 frames a second. Then the lap dissolve, which should rewind about ninety frames.

A torch through the lens at several zoom positions. Then the finder: split image present and splitting, dioptre ring moving.

Seals not tarry, take-up spindle turning, claw ticking. Grip contacts checked for corrosion, flexed while the camera runs.

Most cameras sent for repair are not broken. Put a fresh set in before you conclude anything, and do it before you test any other fault on this page, because tired cells imitate half of them. Use ordinary alkaline cells, not rechargeables. Not because rechargeables damage anything — they do not, and one or two makers supplied their own rechargeable packs — but because of three things that all read as a broken camera. A nickel-metal-hydride cell is 1.2 volts against an alkaline's 1.5, so six of them give 7.2 volts where the camera expects 9. A battery check built for alkalines reads that as flat. A meter calibrated at 1.5 volts reads the light wrong at 1.2. And ordinary rechargeables lose ten to fifteen per cent of their charge every month sitting in a drawer, so a camera used three times a year is dead every time you pick it up, where alkalines lose two or three per cent in a year. If you want rechargeables anyway, use low-self-discharge cells, charge them the week you shoot, and trust the battery check less. Never mix old and new cells, or two chemistries, in one camera. And take them out when you put the camera away: a leaking cell is the commonest way a working camera becomes a dead one.

Cartridges do jam, and it is not always the camera. Shooters have reported cartridges that would not advance in one body and ran perfectly in another, and the same fault following the cartridge rather than the camera across different models. The test takes ten seconds and settles it. Take the cartridge out, mark the film through the front window with a permanent pen, put it back, run the camera two or three seconds, and take it out again. If the mark has gone, the film moved. Three separate labs give that same test. Then swap. Try a different cartridge in the same camera, or the same cartridge in a different camera. One bad roll points at the cartridge. Three bad rolls point at the camera. Things that mislead people: the footage counter can move while the film does not, so it proves nothing on its own. And check each roll reads EXPOSED at the end before you send it off. If it jams, do not open the cartridge. You cannot inspect it without fogging the film, and you destroy both the footage and the evidence. Send it to the lab anyway — they open it in darkness and can often recover what was shot. Kodak runs a feedback form for cartridges, and some sellers will replace a jammed one. One popular explanation is worth correcting: the story that Vision3 stocks jam because their base is thicker, being designed for 16mm and 35mm. Kodak's own data describes the 35mm and Super 8 versions of a stock identically and publishes no base thickness at all. The only documented difference is between negative and reversal film, and the lab that documents it says the thicker negative helps rather than hurts. The jams that are documented were on reversal stock.

The camera shows END in the viewfinder permanently, or advances one frame at a time, on fresh film and fresh batteries. The main internal drive gear has degraded. Note what the fault actually is: END is a designed end-of-film warning working correctly. The transport has stopped and the camera is telling you so. Do not chase a display fault. A shop that sells the repair puts the part's life at about forty years, which means most surviving examples are at or past it. Assume the repair is needed until a specific camera proves otherwise. Spot it with a continuous twenty-second run. The repair is full disassembly and a new gear, normally bundled with a clean, new light seals, frame-rate calibration and board cleaning. It is a large repair, it takes months, and the shop that does it warns that internal parts are fragile and do-it-yourself usually makes it worse. The gap between an untested body and a properly serviced one is almost exactly the cost of this repair.

The iris is driven by its own motor under servo control, so manual is a powered manual, not a mechanical linkage — it commands the same servo as the automatic exposure. There is no mechanical fallback. If the servo or its drive circuit fails, manual fails with it. A fault confined to the meter cell may still leave manual working, but do not count on it. Unlike a mechanical-iris camera, you cannot reliably shoot your way around an exposure fault here. Test manual, automatic and AE lock separately before you buy.

The six cells sit in the folding grip and the power has to cross a junction that is a known Canon weak point. Surface corrosion cleans off at home. Deeper corrosion means removing the grip, with the warning that the circuitry will earth itself onto any tool you touch it with.

A home fix, and worth doing early, because degraded foam lets moisture in and moisture corrodes contacts.

Seized advance motor, grimy motor contacts, dry bearings, a jammed zoom cog. The camera is fairly noisy even when healthy, so judge steadiness rather than volume. Grime and dry bearings are borderline home fixes; a seized motor may not be economic.

The meter is a silicon cell, not CdS, so it does not suffer the classic ageing problem — a genuine point in this camera's favour. What drifts is the servo and the electronics around it. Bench work, though the compensation dial and AE lock will absorb a known consistent error in the meantime.

The switch has a lock button that must be held while it moves, and that interlock seizes with dried grease. Exercising it sometimes helps. Beyond that it sits next to the gate, so leave it to a technician.

The fade sweeps the shutter physically closed and the lap dissolve button sits in the centre of the shutter angle dial, so all three share one mechanism. Blades that stall part-closed, or a fade with the wrong duration, mean it is gummed. Bench work.

Dead in practice: Kodak stopped making striped Super 8 sound film in the late nineties, and every current stock is a silent cartridge. Repair shops now offer to remove the sound system as a weight saving. Do not pay extra for working sound, and do not treat untested sound as a fault. The pulse sync output for double-system sound is the part that still matters and still works with a modern recorder.

Seventeen elements in thirteen groups is a great deal of glass and a great many cemented surfaces. A professional lens overhaul on a Super 8 zoom starts higher than most whole cameras cost, which is the honest thing to tell anyone looking at a hazed one. Seized filters on the 72mm front thread are common and come off with careful plier work.

The screw heads are soft, and a single stripped screw can end the job. There are almost no donor cameras.