Fujifilm Single-8 R25N

R25N is one of the last two Single-8 cartridges Fuji ever made. The format launched in 1965 as Fuji's answer to Kodak's Super 8, capturing roughly 80 percent of the Japanese home-movie market through the early 1970s while losing badly everywhere else. The film inside is the same width and frame pitch as Super 8, so a Single-8 reel projects fine on any Super 8 projector. The cartridges are the part that is not compatible.

Fuji ran the Single-8 base on polyester at two-thirds the thickness of the triacetate Kodak used for Super 8. The thinner base let Fuji design a B-shaped cartridge with two separate coplanar spools, which gave the format something Super 8 never had: unlimited in-camera rewind for double exposures and lap dissolves. Daicon Film, the Osaka collective that became Gainax, leaned on this for their early 1980s tokusatsu shorts.

R25N itself is a daylight-balanced color reversal stock at ISO 25, color temperature 5500K, processed in a Fuji-specific chemistry that is neither Kodachrome's K-14 nor standard E-6. The look sits next to Kodachrome 25 in Super 8: clean, slightly cool color, very fine grain for a small frame, crisp resolution out of any decent prime.

Fuji announced the end of Single-8 in 2009 but held on until March 2012 after Japanese petitions, then stopped processing in late 2013. Cold-stored R25N now needs either a specialist lab (Super8 Reversal Lab in the Netherlands) or a hand-modified workflow. In January 2024 a community 3D-printed cartridge appeared that lets other 8mm stocks load into Fujica Z and ZC bodies, putting those cameras back on the active list.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.1. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. For a 25-ASA cine stock running at sub-second per-frame exposures, you will essentially never trigger it in normal use. Stop-motion shooters working tripod frame-by-frame past one second are the only audience this math applies to, and even then it stays gentle: a metered 10-second per-frame exposure runs around 13 seconds at the gate.