CineStill 800T (120)

The 120 release of CineStill 800T came out of the original September 2014 medium-format Kickstarter (later relaunched on IndieGoGo in early 2016), which solved the backing-paper and respooling problems for the tungsten stock. Brothers Brian and Brandon Wright had been selling 35mm 800T since founding CineStill in 2012, and the medium-format community had treated the 120 question as the obvious next step. The first retail production run hit shelves in April 2017.

In 120 the Vision3 500T emulsion behaves the way it does in 35mm, with two important differences. The halation bloom around point light sources, which is the entire identity of 800T in small format, scales with the size of the image circle rather than with the frame. On a 6x6 frame the red corona that defines a 35mm streetlight at night occupies a smaller fraction of the image, giving cleaner overall negatives and a halation effect that reads as accent rather than filling the frame. Whether that is a gain or a loss depends on why you bought the film.

The second difference is grain. Vision3 500T pushed up two-thirds of a stop to 800 has visible grain in 35mm, sometimes muddy in daylight and gorgeous at night. In 120 that grain calms considerably. Skin tones in indoor light come back with the warmth that has made 800T the most-Instagrammed tungsten stock in history, and the smoothness of the Vision3 chemistry comes through more clearly.

Daytime use wants an 85B warming filter to convert tungsten to daylight at effective ISO 500, or a stop of overexposure if you do not have one. Compared with the 35mm version, you trade some of the heavy halation aesthetic for cleaner files. Compared with Lomography 800 in 120, 800T leans warmer and gives the bloom Lomography does not. Sold in single rolls and five-roll bricks.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 30-second city-night exposure runs about 90 seconds at the negative. Kodak does not publish a Vision3 still reciprocity curve, so the correction is a conservative working estimate. For deep-sky astro past a minute, bracket aggressively.