Fujifilm F-500T 8572

Fujifilm announced F-500T 8572 in January 1999 as the high-speed flagship of the Super F-Series, the line that put Fujifilm into serious competition with Kodak in tungsten cinema stocks for the first time. The selling point was a then-new Super Uniform Fine Grain technology that kept grain visibly tighter at ISO 500 tungsten than the previous Fujifilm fast stocks had managed. It ran in production for roughly five years before the Eterna 500T 8573 superseded it in 2004.

The filmography is where 8572 earns its keep in any honest history. Janusz Kaminski lit Minority Report on it for Spielberg in 2002. Matthew Libatique used it on Requiem for a Dream. Eduardo Serra ran it on The Wings of the Dove and What Dreams May Come, work that won him an Oscar nomination. Emmanuel Lubezki shot Ali with it. Barry Ackroyd picked it for United 93. Chris Menges, who lights everything with available windows when he can, ran it on Dirty Pretty Things and North Country. ShotOnWhat lists around two dozen feature credits, almost all of them between 1997 and 2006.

For still photographers running 8572 through a 35mm body now, the look is colder and slightly more naturalistic than CineStill 800T. The grain is bigger than Eterna 500T (this is a 1999 emulsion, after all) but not coarse. Skin under tungsten holds neutral. Daylight without an 85B conversion filter goes hard cyan and some shooters chase exactly that, the rest cut it with the filter and lose half a stop.

The stock has a remjet anti-halation backing like every motion-picture negative of its era. That kills any normal C-41 dip at a consumer lab, so you either pre-bath in soda solution and run it through a home C-41 tank, or ship it to an ECN-2 cinema lab. Cross-processing in C-41 lifts contrast hard, sometimes too hard. ECN-2 gives you the original Kaminski-Lubezki look.

Availability is auction-only. Most rolls trade as cold-stored short-ends, frequently through 35mmdealer.de, hand-spooled from 400-foot cinema cans. The film is twenty-plus years old at this point, and ISO has drifted on most of it. Rate at 250 to 320 to be safe.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 8-second night exposure climbs to about 10 seconds at the negative. For city-street tungsten work the math is small but worth keeping in past about five seconds; for anything longer than thirty seconds, bracket.