32Mm

Although few, if any, films these days are shot with 32mm film spools, collectors can still occasionally find vintage trailers or films in this medium. The 32 mm measurement corresponds mainly to a spool fitting into a particular projector--but film can be rewound into an appropriate spool.

There have been instances in the motion picture industry when 32mm film has been used but 35mm is by far the standard, with 8mm and 16mm coming in as distant runners up. As HD televisions and wide screen formats are continuing to gain in popularity, a resurgence of 32mm film is highly unlikely. At least for the foreseeable future, 32mm will remain a reference to the lens on the camera and not the film inside.

In regards to the most common usage of 32mm in photography, namely as the lens' focal length, it is considered a wide angle lens. In photography, a focal length of 50mm is roughly equivalent to the focal length of the human eye. Any length below 50mm is wide angle and any length above 50mm is telephoto--sometimes called zoom. A zoom lens, however, technically only refers to lenses with changeable focal lengths (e.g., a 32/80mm zoom lens).

Whether for still photography or motion picture photography, the relationships between the focal length of the lens and the size of the aperture correspond to the camera's focus and the amount of light reaching the lens respectively. Aperture is measured in f-stops. This is a relatively advanced photography topic, but suffice it to say that the higher the f-stop, the less light makes its way into the lens. They are noted as such, f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, etc.