Felipe Locca

Thanks for your answers! Makes sense, mass and weight and size didn't occur to me! But it seems like a good reason, all the claw movements I've seem look smaller and lighter than geneva drives! Lubrication also seems like a strong factor. I've seem a lot of pictures of claw mechanisms that appear to need a lot less lubrication(Arri 2c comes to mind), and I can imagine the difficulty to implement stronger lubrication in the smaller package of a camera! I also didn't consider how precisely manufactured geneva drives might need to be, didn't even imagined they would need to be hardened! That brings a lot of complexity into manufacturing! Dan and Dom, thanks for your recommendations!

Hello! Sorry if this isn't the right section of the forum for this type of question. I've been doing some reading on the history of motion picture cameras and something got me curious about the mechanics used in them. It seems some early film cameras used the geneva wheel mechanism for advancing the film for exposure. And a lot of projectors have used the same mechanism for decades more. But apparently it didn't took long for camera designers to move away from the geneva wheel to use pull down claws of various forms. I imagine there is some reason for that. First I assumed it could be that pull down claws are more precise or durable, but it seems that projectors kept being designed with geneva wheels through out the XX century. And I got the impression that projectors need the same precision and probably even more durability than cameras, as they might run for a lot more hours overall. Considering the the geneva drive appears to be a lot easier to design, manufacture, assemble and repair, does anyone has an idea on why that happened? The only reason I can imagine is noise, maybe the claw mechanisms are overall more silent. That would explain why the geneva drive on cameras was more common in the early days before sound for film was developed. Also, if anyone has any recomendation of any book or text regarding the history of development of the mechanics of film cameras I'd love to learn more about that!