Eastman 5247 Film

"FROM ONE GREAT KODAK FILM
Slides, Prints and Negatives"

This is the advertising blurb on the tattered mailer I found at the bottom of a box of miscellaneous photo stuff. The film was featured as being able to be exposed at 100, 200 or 400 asa speeds and in daylight, by strobes or under tungsten lighting. It would give you negatives, prints and slides. I used it for a few years about 20-25 years ago. I was a new photographer, I liked the idea of getting slides and negs and the price was more than right.

In reality, it was just tungsten balanced negative film that was used in the motion picture industry. They pushed processed it to give the higher asa speeds. Filter packs balanced it for prints or slide transfer. In retrospect, I would have preferred them being more forthcoming with the details of the film so that I could expose correctly at the normal asa and use proper filtration in sunlight and with flash. It did not give you slides and negs from the same emulsion as the advertising intimated but the negatives were photographically transfered to a positive film emulsion and thats where you got the slides. Yes, this is the way that motion pictures are printed, the positive dupes (what you see on the big screen) are made in direct photographic transfers from motion picture negative film.

Where did this film come from, I never saw it in stores? Again, it was not a consumer film but a motion picture film. When they had some left on the reels and there was not enough to be useful for a motion picture shoot it was sold to labs that reloaded it into 35mm film cartridges and who then sold it to consumers as a sort of miracle film. Part of the miracle was that you had to have the film processed only at their lab. You couldn't just take it anyplace else anyway. Read on to find out why.

That's right. There's more. I worked in a film lab for a while and this is how I found out a lot about this film. It cannot be processed in normal C-41 or E-6 chemistry because of a rem-jet backing. This backing hopelessly cruds up your C-41 or E-6 processing machine (customers would bring it in as slide film and some would inadvertentely get processed). I forget the process that it uses but very few labs were equipped to do this. Additionally, it has a funky deep amber mask and labs have a difficult time hitting the dichroic filter settings for printing this film. If they use automated machines for printing they usually do not have a setting for this film and your prints come back with an ugly cast. A pro lab with a skilled operator is usually able to balance the color but one-hour labs and many send-away printers have a hard time with this, I know this because I have tried it. I'm tempted to take some out to the new Fuji machines to see if they can give me a usable print.

Some people really bad mouth this film but it is not that all that bad. When properly exposed the grain and contrast are OK (please don't flame me). Remember, you have to compare this to consumer grade films that were available in the 1970's when this film was a big thing among amateur photogs.

Below is a frame from a roll shot in 1978. I used a Konica TC with 50mm f1.7 Hexanon. Probably shot at 100 asa in daylight unfiltered and I usually set the shutter at 1/125 so and the aperture should have been around f11 on auto. Handheld of course. (Scanned at 2800 dpi with no sharpening and reduced and transformed to a medium compressed jpg). This prints quite well and the scan below does not really do it justice.

Next, an actual pixel size crop of left dormer on second house from the right (no sharpening used):

As I said, this film is not really that bad. A higher resolution scanner would probably even give better results.
It's just that balancing the color in a normal lab will give you fits.

It is said that this film is not really archival but I have not seen any major problems with my negatives in this respect. My biggest problems are the terrible scratches on all the negatives from the sleeving machine that the lab I sent my film to used. My negatives were uncut and rolled up tightly in the sleeves for 20 plus years and the film is very difficult to remove from the sleeves let alone uncurl without doing some damage. You must slowly peel the sleeve away from both sides of the film and it is easier to do this with two people, one person holds the film while the other person peels away the sleeve. I sometimes think it would be easier to skin a live snake.

Now the slide dupes that came from the lab are not archival. Most of mine have faded beyond use especially any that were projected a number of times. But I still have those scratched up tightly sleeved negatives.

Now what do I do?

Enter the digital film scanner. I have an inexpensive Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II that scans at 2800 dpi. Finally, after all these years of frustration with this film, I am able to scan them, touch them up in Photoshop and get great color correction and usable, displayable prints from my inkjet printer. Of course inkjet prints will fade, some quite rapidly when exposed to bright sunlight and high levels of ozone, but I finally have displayable prints at a reasonable cost. For longer lasting prints I am still going to see if my local one-hour lab with the new Fuji machine can print these 5247 negs for me. They use Fuji Crystal Archive Paper with an extimated life of 70 years. If not, there is always the option of having my corrected and touched-up TIFF scans printed by a Light Jet laser printer. The Light Jet process is great but expensive, especially if they insist on doing a drum scan of your neg (which may be overkill for the 35mm format) and with my 5247 scratched up film I would still have to pay for digital retouching. For the Light Jet printer you will probably get best results with scans in the 6000 dpi and up range so my 2800 dpi scans would probably be marginal for this process. So, my salvation with this film has been the scanner and inkjet printer.

*****

Addendum: I found more info on this film.
Kodak has a data sheet on this at http://www.kodak.com/US/plugins/acrobat/en/motion/products/negative/ti0835.pdf
The developer process is ECN-2
They list it as a 3200K 125 asa film with "high sharpness, fine grain, and excellent color rendition".

Home

Check our low prices on long distance and other services for home or business