(1) Discontinued by major manufacturers but still produced by Ferrania.
(2) Discontinued by major manufacturers but still produced by Efke and Maco.
Unless otherwise noted, all formats were introduced by Kodak, who began allocating the number series in 1913. Before that, films were just identified by the name of the cameras they were intended for.
For roll holder means film for cartridge roll holders, allowing roll film to be used with cameras designed to use glass plates.
The primary reason there were so many different negative formats in the early days was that prints were made by contact, without use of an enlarger. The film format would thus be exactly the same as the size of the print -- so if you wanted large prints, you would have to use a large camera and corresponding film format.
Over the years there have been many filmformats, and so it can be confusing to determine what type of materials you have.
Since there are many filmformats we cannot explain all types, but will cover the more common ones; 110 (sub-miniature format), APS, 35mm (standard format), 120 (medium format), and 4"x5" (large format).
Inside the cassette the film is 23mm wide and the frames are 30.2mm x 16.7mm in size (don't open the cassette or it will be ruined!).
After the film is developed at the laboratory, it is slit down the middle and the pieces are spliced together, resulting in an 8mmfilm.
The film itself comes either wound tightly around a plastic `core,' for loading into a camera magazine (either in a darkroom, or a portable `changing bag'), or, for 100' and 200' lengths, mounted on small metal spools (like those for regular 8mm), which can be loaded into the camera in moderately bright daylight.
This format is now rarely used for feature film cinematography, although it is often used for background plates and other visual effects scenes which benefit from the extra negative area and resulting high resolution of that format, as the negative contains an area which is four times that of a standard 1.85:1 projected frame.
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