Fujifilm Reala 500D 8592

Reala 500D 8592 was Fujifilm's flagship daylight motion-picture stock at the start of the 2000s and the first to ship with the company's 4th Colour Layer technology. That fourth layer sat between the green and red layers and was sensitive to cyan, engineered to push the film's color response closer to human eye sensitivity. The practical effect was cleaner skin tones under mixed light, cleaner blues, and tighter handling of fluorescent green cast. Released December 2001, discontinued February 2011.

At ISO 500 it was the fastest daylight-balanced cinema negative ever offered, full stop. Anthony Dod Mantle leaned on Fujifilm stocks including Reala 500D for the Mumbai night and dawn sequences of Slumdog Millionaire, which won him the cinematography Oscar in 2009. The 8592 base also turned up in Marley and Green Zone. ShotOnWhat lists only around two dozen feature credits; by the time it hit its stride, Kodak Vision3 had taken most of the daylight market.

For still shooters using bulk short-ends, the look is muted, slightly cool, with a long highlight roll-off that does not compress the way Portra does, and skin that reads pale and a touch flat next to Portra 400 but cleaner under window-mixed-with-fluorescent light. Grain is finer than you would expect for a 500-speed color negative.

The usual cine-stock caveats apply. There is a remjet anti-halation backing on the base side, which kills any normal C-41 lab dip. You either send it to a cinema lab that runs ECN-2, or you pre-bath it yourself in baking soda solution and put it through a home C-41 tank.

Availability is auction-only. Most short-ends in circulation are deep-frozen lab leftovers, and the price reflects it.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10, low for any color negative. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure becomes about 13 seconds at the negative, barely a third of a stop. For night street work where 500D was always meant to shine, the math stays gentle.