The Eastman Kodak Company invented regular 8mm film in 1932 as an inexpensive alternative to 16mm. The low cost made regular 8mm a popular format for home movies and amateur filmmaking. In 1965, Kodak released super 8mm, which offered improvements over standard 8mm in both image quality and ease of use. Super 8mm quickly became the preferred low-cost film format. Since the advent of video in the 1980s, however, both formats have seen a significant reduction in popularity.
The sprocket holes of super 8mm take up only half the width of regular 8mm sprocket holes, which allows the images on super 8mm to cover 35 percent more area. This larger image area allows super 8mm to capture more detail than regular 8mm. However, some proponents of regular 8mm claim that the plastic pressure plates used in super 8mm film cartridges tend to compromise any improvement in image quality.
Super 8mm film has significantly narrower sprocket holes than those in regular 8mm film. Due to the smaller sprocket hole size, super 8mm provides a larger image area than standard 8mm. To quickly tell the difference between super 8mm and regular 8mm, remember that the sprocket holes on super 8mm align with the center of each image frame; on regular 8mm, the sprocket holes line up with the top and bottom of each frame.
Regular 8mm is shot on 16mm film and run through the camera twice. After running the film through the camera once and exposing one half, the photographer flips the film and runs it through the camera again in order to expose the second half. During processing, the photographer splits the film down the center and attaches it at the ends, resulting in a single roll of 8mm film twice as long as the original 16mm roll.
Super 8mm loads more easily into a camera because it is sold in ready-to-use cartridges rather than on reels, which require tedious threading of the film into the camera. Also, super 8mm does not run through the camera twice as does regular 8mm, since super 8mm originates as an 8mm-size film. For these reasons, as well as the improved image quality, super 8mm became the more popular of these two formats.