DuPont Superior 2

DuPont's Superior series ran through the middle of the twentieth century when DuPont still made film in Parlin, New Jersey. Superior 2 sat at ASA 80, slower than Superior 3 at 125. Press shooters and studio photographers used DuPont alongside Kodak and Ansco depending on which house their lab preferred, and by the late 1950s DuPont had built a working share of the American professional market before gradually exiting photographic emulsions in the 1960s.

It is a conventional cubic-grain panchromatic emulsion, manufactured before T-grain or delta-crystal technologies existed. The grain reads as the old American newspaper-photograph texture, the kind of look that defined wire service work of the 1940s and 1950s. Resolution and acutance fall short of anything Kodak or Ilford currently sells at ISO 100. Compared with current Fomapan 100, the Superior 2 character is closer in spirit to that mid-century pictorial look than to anything engineered for contemporary scanning.

Processing in the period meant DK-50 or D-76 at full strength. Modern attempts should work, with the caveat that the emulsion has aged significantly. Any roll surfacing today will have lost speed and gained base fog, so rating it at 25 or 40 is more realistic than trusting the original ASA 80. Stand development in Rodinal 1:100 stretches whatever latitude remains.

This film is long out of production. Surviving rolls only turn up through estate auctions, old camera bag finds, or specialist resellers. Treat any sourced roll as a historical document first and a working film second. Both sheet and 35mm formats existed; availability today is luck.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve. A metered 30-second exposure becomes about 90 seconds at the negative. With expired film of this vintage, additional drift on top of the engineered curve is essentially guaranteed, so bracket past about ten seconds.