DuPont Superior 1

DuPont Superior 1, designated Type 904B, was a slow black and white 35mm motion picture negative film rated at ASA 23 in daylight and 20 under incandescent light. It sat at the bottom of DuPont's Superior speed ladder, below Superior 2 at ASA 80 and Superior 3 at ASA 125. The trio appears together in the 1956 American Cinematographer Manual, which is where most surviving published specifications come from.

DuPont entered the 35mm motion picture market in 1926 and ran the film business out of its Parlin, New Jersey plant. The Superior line was their working professional stock, sold against Kodak's Plus-X and Super-XX during the studio era. Hollywood occasionally used DuPont negative for cost reasons, but Eastman dominated the market. DuPont's last appearance in the American Cinematographer Manual was 1969.

Specific shooting accounts of Superior 1 are scarce in modern literature. At ASA 23 it was a bright-light film, intended for daylight exteriors where slowness bought you fine grain. What surviving footage exists shows tight grain and moderate contrast, but those impressions come from decade-old transfers rather than fresh negatives.

A realistic modern comparison: think Adox CHS 100 II two stops slower, or Ilford Pan F Plus pulled to 25. The era suggests something closer in spirit to those than to any modern T-grain stock. If you encounter a roll, expect serious base fog from age and possibly nitrate decomposition if the stock predates DuPont's safety-film transition.

Format was 35mm motion picture, in 100ft and 400ft cans. No still photography packaging existed. Any surviving stock is decades expired, and nitrate-era rolls are legally restricted in most jurisdictions for fire risk.

The reciprocity exponent recorded here is 1.31, the conventional silver-grain baseline. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading lands at roughly 90 seconds at the negative. Anyone shooting surviving Superior 1 is testing rather than working. Bracket aggressively.