MY WORKING ZC1000Ns

I´m currently reorganising the HAL9000 room in my professional Studio, a space dedicated not to nostalgia, but to tools that are still very much alive and working. The first step in this quiet reordering has been a simple but meaningful gesture: bringing together, on two shelves of a glass cabinet, the two Fujica ZC1000N cameras that I actively use for professional work, along with the accessories that truly belong to them.

Not everything I own, but everything I use.

At the heart of this small ecosystem are three ZC1000N camera bodies, one of them disassembled as spare. Each is paired with its original Fujinon optics: the legendary Fujinon EBC f/1.8 7.5–75 mm zoom, with macro capability at any focal length, and the equally remarkable Fujinon EBC f/1.8 5.5 mm ultra-wide, also with macro, a lens that still feels audacious today.

ZC1000N: a system camera by Shigeo Mizukawa

Around these originals gravitate the lenses and accessories that, over the years, have transformed the ZC1000N into something closer to a modular optical laboratory than a mere S8 camera.

Among them:

• Two Leitz Cinegon 10 mm lenses,

• One Leitz Cinegon paired with an Iscorama 36 anamorphic,

• A Pentax f/1.0 8–48 mm with Iscorama 42,

• An Iscorama 54 Multicoated,

• An uncoated Iscorama 54, kept precisely because it flares more,

• A Soviet grip (I use it when I have little space on helicopters or submarines),

• A Century 3.5 mm extreme wide-angle,

• Several large-diameter wide-angle converters specifically chosen to work with anamorphics,

• Original Fujifilm C-mount adapters to virtually every major photographic and cine lens system.

In Taylor Valley in Antarctica, at 77°37′S 163°00′E, at -35º Celsius. ZC1000N
is here with the Fujinon 5.5 mm and the Soviet grip for helicopter

Then come the devices that reveal the ZC1000’s true vocation as a camera built for serious film making:

• A manual Fujifilm hand-crank,

• Two slow-exposure devices,

• Three Fujifilm intervalometers,

• Two self-timers,

• Extension tubes,

• Eyepiece dioptre-correction Fujifilm lenses, pushing the original limits of the finder,

• A Fujifilm microscope adapter,

• A Fujifilm telescope adapter.

ZC1000N in the Antarctic

And then, the optics that defy expectations in a format often dismissed as “small”:

• A Schneider f/0.95, coupled with a Canon wide-angle converter,

• A Fujinon EBC ultra-macro, equivalent to 350 mm,

• A Fujinon EBC zoom matching the camera’s original zoom lens size, but functioning as an ultra-telephoto equivalent to 500–1000 mm,

• A Fujinon EBC ultra-tele zoom equivalent to 350–1800 mm,

• Another ultra-tele Fujinon EBC equivalent to 500–1300 mm, opening to f/3.8,

• And a remarkably lightweight ultra-tele Fujinon EBC, equivalent to 550–1400 mm.

Other accessories  (sound-sync devices, external battery compartments, and lenses of more occasional use, including a  super-tele equivalent to 6500 mm) remain stored in a separate room. They exist, but they are not part of the daily conversation.

This cabinet is not a display. It´s a working constellation.

Each item here has earned its place by being used, tested, repaired, combined, and trusted. Together, they form a reminder of what the Fujica ZC1000N, the camera system designed by my friend Shigeo Mizukuwa,  really is: not just the most advanced 8 mm type S camera ever built, but a platform conceived with an openness that still invites discovery half a century later.

More updates will follow.

Cine Assist, ICE model,  for sync sound in very low temperatures