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

If you would like to see the vast world of creative possibilities with Super-8 products, please click here: Pro 8mm