It's Film Friday - Try Some Cinestill 50D at 15% Off!

[BlueMoonCamera]

Try some Cinestill 50 D at 15% off our regular price, in-store or by mail, offer good through 9:00 a.m. Saturday, April 12! (And check out the surprise discount on Kodak Vision 3 16mm & Super 8 Cine Film!) Sign up for The Loupe, our free weekly newsletter, and get Film Friday discounts sent directly to your email inbox! We don't retain or sell personal information, and we promise never to send you mail more than once a week.

Cinestill 50D is the less popular brother to Cinestill’s other film: the 800T. Because 50D often gets passed over for the 800T, including by us, we figured it would be a great film to feature on Film Friday. It is a different and lovely film in its own right and deserves a bit more attention than it receives.

Cinestill 50D is actually Kodak Vision 3 50D (otherwise known as Kodak 5203/7203) color negative motion picture film. Cinestill acquires the Vision 3 50D film from Kodak and then uses their process to remove the film’s rem-jet backing, allowing the film to be easily processed by any lab in C-41 chemistry. We’ll get into that in a bit more detail below. The result of this “conversion” is that a lot more still photographers out there get to experiment with an emulsion that had previously been used only by motion picture photographers.

So what’s the deal with it and why should we be interested in this film? The quick overview is Cinestill 50D brings a bit of that cine look to your favorite still camera. The 50D emulsion is noted for a lovely pastel color palette, very fine grain and wonderful exposure latitude. The “D” in its name references the fact that it is daylight-balanced. It also produces some of the most accurate skin tones we have seen in a color negative film. In some cases we like it even better than Portra.

 

[koraks]

Cinestill acquires the Vision 3 50D film from Kodak and then uses their process to remove the film’s rem-jet backing

Fortunately, this is no longer the case! Eastman Kodak skip the remjet application step these days specifically for Cinestill.

Best results in terms of objective color fidelity will be had by developing the film in ECN2 developer. Cross-processing in C41 is also possible at the expense of some color crossover and a substantially different color balance. This can be mostly fixed in digital post processing. In analog/optical printing, the color balance can be adjusted, but the crossover is more tricky to deal with. ECN2-developed Kodak Vision3 (Cinestill) film prints quite well optically if the ECN2 development step is extended by some 30 seconds.