A new page for the remaining gauges.

16mm

I have very little on 16mm, I suppose because it has never been of much interest to me. Most of the titles on 16 seemed to me to be incomprehensible, in terms of where anyone got the idea, how on earth they sold it to a film producer, why it was made, put onto 16mm and then ultimately sold to who? Is there really anyone who would want to view some of this dross once, let alone own for presumably their repeated delight? There are also far too many dupes and prices far too high for any film worth owning. But who am I to talk - I'm big into 9.5 and 17.5!

Pic 1 is actually from a Debrie Handbook. 

That's about it, really. There were a few early attempts at a different format, quite apart from the much later Super 16. Here is some info. 

I include Ozophane here because I met it on 16mm, one of the many and varied attractions of the old Buckingham Film Museum. It was on a very thin base which did not appear to be terribly strong; the projector I saw used a velvet-lined gate, which made me think the film must have been fragile.

This may be the time to look at the so-called "Gauge Wars", when comparisons were frequently made between the three amateur formats then extant. Apart from cost and things like the range and capabilities of available equipment, film size itself was the focus of considerable attention. Pathescope in particular used to bang on quite a bit about how efficient 9.5mm was in terms of the percentage of the total film area used for the image. No mention was made, of course, of the percentage of image area likely to be marred by scratching. Such comparisons were inevitably more muted in the sound era when 9.5 had lost a chunk of its picture area to a sound track.

8mm

 Some of the territory is covered in the gauge comparisons above. Pic 1 reveals that the Standard 8mm image was 4.37mm by 3.28mm and covered less than half of the surface area. I have seen professional material on 8mm and some excellent amateur footage, but while these show what the gauge could achieve, size was limited if a decent screen image was to be obtained. Pic 1 also shows that the film image had to be magnified 228 times to get a one metre picture. Interestingly, Super 8 was not actually that much better. However, my copy of The Lion King exhibits amazing quality. 

In November 1965, not long after the introduction of Super 8, ACW did a detailed comparison of the two 8mm formats.

          
I have also included a snippet about an aborted optical sound proposal for Standard 8. There was an 8mm projector with provision for optical tacks, The Toei Talkie, but nothing ever came of it. I would love to know more if anyone has any information or even some film. The final pic is from SmallFormat magazine, showing the highly logical 8.75mm film from China because 8.75 is precisely 25% of 35. Maximum economy!

17.5

As I mentioned above, 17.5 never had a formal, published standard, and it was years before I came across a decent image, for which I am indebted to J C Laubie. I find it hard to understand why Kodak came up with 16mm when 17.5 does seem, objectively, to have the edge, although admittedly 17.5 would have been more costly as it had a much longer pitch, 9.5mm as against 7.62mm for 16mm.

It is well known that 17.5 was , for logical reasons, chosen by many pioneers to try out (pic 2), and one rather later (pic 3). I have included an image I put together directly comparing 16mm and 17.5mm.

28mm (and 22mm)

28mm was the first commercially-successful attempt at a gauge smaller than 35mm. Although sometimes regarded as a curiosity, 28mm did much to pave the way for the smaller gauges that became possible as film technology advanced and better quality could be gotten from smaller images. Edison's 22mm, introduced in the same year, rapidly became a white elephant, not only because of the very small image size but because the technology was wrong - repeated forward and reverse cranking just didn't meet the need.

28mm, as already mentioned, did have its own standard thru the SMPE.

At one point, there were three Edison 22mmm Home Kinetoscopes on American eBay, so I grabbed lots of pix; they're on a page linked to this one. Individual pictures were 4mm x 6mm.

35mm and beyond

This is just a collection of bits and pieces that I came across at one time or another.

                              
         DOLBYEVOLUTION.pdf
For 35mm and larger, you could do a lot worse than the BKSTS wallcharts put together by Grant Lobban, which show all sorts of details about 35mm (and bigger) including colour processes, sound and etc. This eems to be a sensible place to put in this pdf on the development of Dolby sound.

Finally, a table I put together with info from the various sources listed here. It is by no means complete and there are some inconsistences, so any help filling it in would be welcome. 

Here are a couple of links if you want to look at gauges in more detail - there have been far more than I have listed on this site, tho 3.2mm does have a page.

Wikipedia has an exhaustive list - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_formats. See also:-

http://oldfilm.org/content/brief-history-amateur-film-gauges-and-related-equipment-1899-2001