CineStill 800T

CineStill 800T is Kodak Vision3 500T cinema film with the remjet anti-halation layer removed, repackaged for still cameras and rated up two-thirds of a stop. The remjet removal is also why every point light source in the frame blooms red. That bloom is the entire reason the stock has become the most-Instagrammed tungsten film in history.

Brothers Brian and Brandon Wright started CineStill in 2012 specifically because they wanted to shoot Vision3 in still cameras without the C-41 lab disasters that remjet causes. The 800T name is misleading: the stock is balanced for tungsten at ISO 800, but most photographers rate it at 400 in mixed light and let the warm highlights do their thing.

Daytime use needs an 85B warming filter to bring it to ISO 500 daylight, or a one-stop overexposure if you do not have one. The grain at night is gorgeous; the grain at noon in direct sun looks muddy.

Reciprocity gets weird with this stock. Vision3 cinema stocks are engineered for the short exposure times of motion picture cameras and Kodak does not publish a still-photography reciprocity curve. Zone Light Meter applies an exponent of 1.31 past one second as a conservative correction, which works well for night street work and ten to thirty second city shots. For deep-sky astro, bracket aggressively past about a minute.

The other CineStill stocks (50D, 400D) skip the halation effect entirely. If you are after the bloom, 800T is the only one.

How the app handles this stock

Box speed: ISO 800. Picker exposes pull/push chips so you can shoot it at any speed you want and the meter follows.
Reciprocity: Above one second the app raises metered time to the power of 1.31.
Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. Cinema decay rates are baked in.

Frequently asked questions

What ISO is CineStill 800T?

CineStill 800T is an ISO 800 cinema film from CineStill. You can rate it at box speed or push and pull it; set the speed you actually shot and the meter follows.

Is CineStill 800T still in production?

Yes. CineStill 800T is a current film you can still buy new.

Does CineStill 800T suffer from reciprocity failure?

Yes, on exposures longer than about one second. Its reciprocity exponent is 1.31, so a metered 10 seconds becomes about 20 seconds. Zone Light Meter applies this automatically.

What formats does CineStill 800T come in?

CineStill 800T was available in 35mm, 120.