Fujifilm · ISO 250 Cinema
Fujifilm Eterna 250D 8553
Worth flagging up front: this slug uses 8553, but Fujifilm's own designation for Eterna 250D is 8563 (and 8663 in 16mm). The 8553 number is actually Eterna 250T, the tungsten sibling. Both stocks landed in 2006 and both died when Fujifilm ended all motion-picture production on March 31, 2013. The body below describes the daylight 250D as the slug implies. If you have a can labeled 8553 in your freezer, you have the tungsten version.
Eterna 250D is one of the cleaner daylight cinema negatives ever made: ISO 250 in daylight, 5500K balance, ultra-fine grain by the standards of any 250-speed color stock. The look that working cinematographers chased was a deliberately subdued palette of low saturation, gentle contrast, and very long highlight latitude that handled mixed location light better than Kodak Vision2 250D could at the same speed. Fifty-five feature credits show up in the ShotOnWhat database, including The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Shame, and parts of The Grandmaster (where Philippe Le Sourd ran Fujifilm rather than Kodak, which was unusual at that scale by 2013).
Next to Kodak Vision3 250D, Eterna 250D reads cooler, less punchy, and softer in the midtones. That is the Fuji house style. Skin tones lean neutral rather than warm; greens stay green rather than shifting toward emerald the way Velvia does. Process in C-41 instead of ECN-2 and contrast lifts hard, which is the experimental look people chase on short-ends.
Grain is the standout. Fujifilm used their second-generation Super Nano Structure tech here, and at ISO 250 the grain pattern is finer than most ISO 100 still-photo color negatives. In medium-format scans it almost disappears.
No new production exists. What is left is freezer stock and short-ends repackaged by outfits like Ethereal Film Store.
Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 20-second exposure becomes about 27 seconds at the negative. Mild enough to ignore on quick night work, worth dialing in past ten seconds.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 250. Picker exposes pull/push chips so you can shoot it at any speed you want and the meter follows.
- Reciprocity: Above one second the app raises metered time to the power of 1.10.
- Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. Cinema decay rates are baked in.