it depends what will best help you tell your story! many people are fine with just a lens and a trigger. however, some popular features include:

• manual aperture (iris) control - this lets you take a light reading with an external meter and set your exposure manually. it's helpful if you're shooting in overcast/contrasty conditions, or if you want a darker or brighter shot.

• variable shutter angle - most feature films are shot with what's called a 180° shutter, which means the shutter is open for half of each frame. super 8 cameras are often 150°, so they're open slightly longer to maximise the light on the film. some cameras have a variable shutter, so you can choose the balance between sharp footage and low-light.

• timelapse - mentioned above in the frame rate section. lets you take a single frame every second/minute/hour/etc

• lap dissolve - this feature lets you do a 'dissolve', a shot the smoothly fades into another shot

• high speed shooting - some cameras have high-speed modes so you can shoot slow-motion. see the frame rates section above for more info

• crystal sync - put simply, super 8 cameras generally don't run at exact framerates, more like 17-19fps than exactly 18fps. crystal sync, used for sync-sound filming in the past, make a super 8 camera run at an exact framerate (often 24fps not the usual 18fps) and keep a consistent speed.

• autom. b - specific to some nizo cameras, autom. b is a timelapse mode where the camera works out the length of long-exposure shooting by itself, leading to well exposed images with a variable frame rate.

• macro - a lens feature rather than a camera feature. let's you shoot super close up images, with objects just centimetres from the lens

• underwater - check out our special section of shooting super 8 underwater