Kodak Eastmancolor 250D 5295

The 5295 designation in Kodak's motion picture catalog pointed to Eastman Color High Speed SA Negative, a 400-speed tungsten emulsion introduced in 1986 alongside its daylight sibling 5297. Databases that list 5295 as a 250D stock are crossing it with the 5297 daylight variant. Worth saying up front. A can labeled 5295 is the high-speed tungsten film, not a daylight negative.

What it was built for. The SA in the product name meant Selective Absorption, a coupler-mask refinement that gave cleaner blue-green separation. Visual effects houses wanted that for blue-screen travelling-matte work in the late 1980s, and Kodak won a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for the stock specifically because of how it handled those mattes. Aliens in 1986, Total Recall in 1990, and the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade composites in 1989 all benefited.

In straight narrative use, Die Hard, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, and Batman 1989 ran 5295 on tungsten-lit interiors. Compared with the EXR 500T 5296 that replaced it in 1989, the 5295 emulsion is grainier and the highlights compress harder. The look reads as late-1980s Hollywood interior. That is the reason cinematographers chase short-end cans of it now.

Processing is ECN-2. Tungsten balance means daylight needs an 85B filter or a one-stop correction. Push processing was uncommon; cinematographers preferred bumping lighting rather than processing past the published curve, which the III-generation dye couplers do not handle gracefully.

Kodak discontinued 5295 in the early 1990s as EXR took over the high-speed slot. Surviving cans turn up in archives and at resellers like Midwest Film Co. Cold storage is your only safe bet now.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.1. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 4-second exposure becomes roughly 5 seconds at the negative. At motion-picture frame rates this never matters. For respool work, fold it in.