Agfa Structurix D2

Structurix D2 is the slowest film in Agfa's industrial X-ray range and the finest-grained stock the company ever coated for general radiography. It is not a pictorial film. Waygate Technologies, the Baker Hughes division that bought the industrial side of Agfa, still manufactures it under the original Structurix name, sold as the sheet you reach for when a casting weld needs optical magnification and every silver grain matters.

The physical sheet is unusual. A blue-tinted polyester base, double-sided emulsion typical of the Structurix D-series, no antihalation layer because gamma and X-ray photons do not bounce around the way visible light does. Drop one into a film holder for pinhole work and you get an emulsion tuned to a wavelength range that overlaps the blue end of the panchromatic spectrum without extending to red. It behaves like a slow, very high-contrast ortho film: insensitive to red safelight, brutal on highlights, ultra-sharp.

Nominal speed in white light sits around ISO 32, the rating that turns up across photographer forums and matches the brief. Treat it as a starting point and bracket. Standard B&W developers mostly work. Rodinal 1:50 gives a contrasty negative that prints punchy. D-76 stock pulls the contrast back toward something usable. Avoid pushing; D2 is contrasty enough at box.

Format is the giveaway this is industrial stock. Sheets in metric NDT sizes: 13x18cm, 18x24cm, 30x40cm, 35x43cm. No 35mm. No 120. Pinhole and view-camera shooters use it because the resolution beats any conventional photographic film at this speed, including Adox CMS 20 II for some applications, and per-sheet cost is competitive through NDT suppliers.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 30-second exposure runs about 90 seconds at the negative; a one-minute reading climbs past three. For pinhole work at f/200 or smaller, that threshold gets crossed on most frames, so the math is doing real work.