Keystone K-4C Movie Camera
Image by Capt Kodak
Manufactured in the 1950’s by Keystone Mfg. Co. of Boston, Massachusetts. This is an 8mm (i.e. “regular 8”) moving camera with a three lens turret. It has a Keystone 2.7mm f/2.0 normal lens (yellow banding and lettering), a Keystone-Elgeet 9mm f/2.0 wide angle (black banding and lettering) and a Keystone-Elgeet 25mm f/2.0 telephoto lens (read banding and lettering). The color banding of the lens matched the color of frame marks in the viewfinder. It has two built in filters (a UV haze and a “Type-A” for tungsten color balanced film) and using a “manual” control, you could do a real fade in/out while shooting. The camera had a selenium cell “electric eye” that controlled the lens aperture as the camera shot 16 fps. And “stop action” (specifically one frame at a time) was a feature provided by lifting up on the shutter release lever instead of pressing down. It used the standard 8mm roll that had to be flipped half way through. The body is a heavy cast metal—about three times the weight of an average MiniDV camera of the same size today…
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