Agfa Structurix D8

Structurix D8 is the fastest standard film in Agfa's industrial radiography line. C6 class under EN ISO 11699-1, ISO 400 for radiographic use, medium grain with very high speed. The exposure factor relative to D2 at 200 kV is roughly fourteen times shorter, which is why NDT shops keep D8 alongside finer-grain stocks. For a steel-reinforced column or thick-wall casting, D8 is what goes in the cassette.

Waygate Technologies (the Baker Hughes division that took over Agfa's NDT business) still makes it for welding, casting, aerospace, defense, and composite inspection. It is not a pictorial film. Photographers who buy it for large-format and pinhole work treat it as a fast orthochromatic emulsion, blue and green sensitive, with red light barely registering on the curve.

Under visible light D8 lands around ISO 80 to 100, much slower than its radiographic rating implies. The latitude is narrower than Fomapan 100, around two stops of useful exposure before highlights block or shadows fall. The look reads like a Wratten 47 panchromatic print from the 1930s: black skies, dark skin, foliage that goes grey instead of luminous.

The practical comparison inside the Structurix line is to D7, the C5 class film one step slower with finer grain. D8 trades resolution for speed, and most photographic shooters who try both settle on D7 or the wide-latitude D6W because the speed advantage does not translate to pictorial use the way the granularity loss does.

Develop in dilute Rodinal at 1:100 for stand development, or in standard X-ray developer to get what Agfa designed. D-76 at 1:1 pushes the contrast higher than most subjects can hold. Sheet format only: 30 by 40 cm and 35 by 43 cm are the common NDT sizes. Cut to 4x5 under a red safelight.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure becomes about 20 seconds at the negative; a 30-second reading climbs to roughly 90. For pinhole and ultra-large-format work, that correction comes up on essentially every frame.