Cameramen framed

Charlie Brooker is certainly right that we remember eras in cinematic style ( What is the difference between The Hobbit and the news? Not as much as there should be , G2, 30 April), and he could even push this back to the frozen monochrome of Victorian photography. But why does he have to spoil it by blaming the hand-cranked cameras of the 1920s for speeded-up footage from that period? Many cameras – though not all – were hand-cranked, and deliberately at different rates, and what they filmed was shown at different speeds too, until the talkies imposed a standard projection rate of 24 frames per second. When we see speeded-up footage today, this is because whoever transferred it couldn't be bothered to adjust the transfer rate – or thought it looked quaint not to. And when Brooker evokes "lush Eastmancolor", I suspect he means late Technicolor, which was certainly lush compared with its cheaper replacement that has now mostly faded to pink. Ian Christie Birkbeck, University of London