CineStill 800T: General Impressions

Generally there isn't too much exciting happening with films. Mostly the less popular ones go away, but the people at CineStill have done something fun. They've taken a few of the newest stocks from Kodak and did a good job repackaging it for normal color chemistry and use. The one that had the most interest to me was the 800Tungsten.

It's pretty much the VISION3 500T stock use for cinema (You can see the 5219 markings on the negatives), but it's had the REMJET removed making it safe for C-41 processing.

The question I had was what is it like to shoot, and is it worth the extra expense a roll. I had a hard time finding details of the sorts of quirks of this film, so I thought I would share my own experience.

ISO 800 or ISO 400

First I would say I am not sure I agree with the speed rating. The very first roll I shot at 800 and felt generally the results were on the underexposed side. It doesn't make or break a shot, but generally shooting at 400 which likely is a slight overexposure generally produces better results. Most of this was based on very dark night shots, and in daylight the difference between 400 and 800 likely made little difference.

SF @ 400 - SJ 800

Starting with a side by side I would argue the texture is better in the 400 shot then the 800 in term of the shadows. I wouldn't be to worried about the glow from overexposure, it's mostly an artifact of the film.

A larger look at a street scene at 400 shows how bright details are still very well preserved but much more gentle texture to the shadows.

An earlier shot at 800 of a similar scene is noticeably more grainy. I actually don't mind the texture it adds, but generally I was much happier shooting a little slower then how CineStill suggested.

I understand the film is designed to be pushed, and I've seen some impressive results others have had so I don't doubt it. I might have to give it a try in the future, but shooting in the kind of low light situations at box speed I'd hesitate from exposing it at 800 unless I had to.

General Daylight

While 800T might be a Tungsten balanced film, I tend to shoot under daylight. While you can bring a  85 filter I feel that's a bit of a hassel. That means without a filter you can either embrace the blue cast or correct it for daylight.

 

Above we see the blue cast from a scan without any adjustments. (This depends on scanner and scanner settings)

Adding a correction to bring all colors together keeps a blue balance to the tone.

Edited to take out the blue cast for a daylight color balance

It can be difficult to get the blue out in mixed lighting like this sunset.

Shade would be even harder with a Tungsten Balance, but I think it did an excellent job. The sunlight's warmth was preserved and the shade isn't too cool.

I wouldn't use this as a first choice for daylight. Something like Ektar simply gives colors you might expect, but the shots are still completely usable. If you personally like it's blue hue then it's going to be great.

Typical Night

But the place where we are rewarded with something special is shooting at night. The Tungsten balance dramatically helps with the mix colored scenes. It seemed to do much better then I have experienced with the mix of neon, florescent, and tungsten lighting.

Halation

There is one thing special about this film compared to most other films, and it comes back to that rem-jet coating. Basically a special coating is added to motion picture film that has to be removed during processing otherwise it ruins the chemistry of C-41. Since we don't have easy access to ECN-2 labs this makes it difficult to use these motion pictures stocks.

The problem is that the rem-jet contains the anti-halation layer, which is removed. This layer is important to adsorb light passing through instead of reflecting it back to the sensitive layers of the film.

It usually doesn't matter expect in the case of very bright lights(which you might have now noticed looking through the photos above)

To start an example of what I would consider bad Halation. The Red Lights have large Halo's and rings around them. They are very visible and distracting. Bright red lights tend to have the worst behavior on this film.

A more harmless halation is simply any very bright white light. They give more of an unexpected red glow that can be interesting, but probably not really wanted.

But sometimes, I like how it happens and think it adds character to a shot. I would consider this the ideal situation where gives a cinematic flair to the image.

But it's surprisingly everywhere when shooting the 800T. I suggest looking back through the shots above and see if you can find examples. It's not a deal breaker for me, but I didn't realize how apparent it would be until I used it. If you dislike the halos and flair then 800T simply isn't going to be a good film for you.

Grain/Sharpness/DR/Scanning

I'm putting grain, sharpness, dynamic range, and scanning all together. If you are digitizing film they all end up dependent in part on the scanner. If you want a spec measurement you should check out the Data-sheet for the Vision 500T stock.

Starting with a close up of grain in daylight is about as good as it's going to get, and the results are pretty good. You can still see the texture pretty clearly anywhere dark in the image, but it's hardly distracting.

As for "sharpness/resolution" the charts in the data sheet for a normal contrast scene give us a max usable resolution of around ~22mp. That sounds believable to me, but unless your lens and technique is perfect always expect a bit lower from the final output.

For example this van in a parking lot provides moderate repeating details. A 100% crop from the center of the image shows the detail. I guess with the film, the lens, and the scanning I maybe ended up with 10mp of detail.

Comparison between 37MP and 9.5MP

A good test is to reduce it to the resolution you suspect it is, then upscale it back, and flip between them. No major reduction in quality supports that the reduced resolution is at least as effective as the original.

But while a night shot really brings out the graininess and the blue cast of the film, if we look at the lines on the edge of the frame of the bus we have another resolution estimate point.

It's pretty impressive and depending how you count lines it's somewhere around 1.5 px wide. That gives us a very respectable "25mp". But I wouldn't count on that level of detail reguarly.

Moving to dynamic range we can start with Kodak's estimation gives it an impressive but not out of this world 13 stops, others give even higher estimations. In reality it's mostly up to personal taste. Film tends to keep giving you detail in highlights but at ever lower quality. Instead i'm interested in what I get from a scan.

Un-adjusted

I always find mixed lighting shots at night to be hard on cameras. Particularly if they have a lot of neon which this does, and it's very well handled. But the overall scene looks dark (because of the scanners settings) so we need to adjust.

adjusted

We can bring up the tones without washing anything out but still have detail in the darker parts of the image. I would attribute much of this to using a decent scanner, but this film seems partially easy to get decent scans from.

Final impressions

Generally I liked the film. It seems to handle over exposure very well, underexposure decently, and scan very easily. I actually think my favorite properly is the halation which is a hallmark of the film. But the question is, is it worth the increased price?

But I can't help but think that it might be very similar to Portra 400. Supposedly the two are closely related. The similarly between the Porta 400 and Vision 500T have invited comparison before and suggests that 500t still has the edge, but it would be fun to try and shoot both of them next to each other and see how different the results really end up being.