Kodak Eastmancolor 400T 5294

5294 is the 400-speed tungsten cinema negative Kodak shipped in 1983 as the high-speed entry in Kodak's 1983 Eastman Color High Speed Negative line. The point was the speed bump. The film it replaced, 5293, was a 250T stock that left cinematographers reaching for more lights than they wanted on night exteriors. 5294 gave them a stop in hand, and you can see the result across mid-1980s features.

The Bond films of the era ran on 5294. Alan Hume shot A View to a Kill in 1985 with it. Alec Mills shot The Living Daylights in 1987 and Licence to Kill in 1989. Dean Cundey lit Back to the Future in 1985 around the 5294 speed envelope. Mark Irwin used it for Cronenberg's The Fly the same year. Freddie Francis was on it for Lynch's Dune in 1984. Robbie Ryan happened to use a Kodak stock that shares the 5294 code on Poor Things in 2023, but that was Ektachrome 100D reversal, not this Eastman Color Negative.

The character is mid-1980s warm with grain that reads as cinematic but visibly there in 16mm. The sibling 7294 is rated EI 320, a third of a stop slower than the 35mm version because of the smaller grain area per frame. Compared with the EXR 500T 5296 that succeeded it after 1989, 5294 looks softer, warmer, grainier. That softness is the appeal now.

Use it as a tungsten interior film. Daylight needs an 85B filter or one-stop correction. ECN-2 processing only. Pushing past one stop produces a magenta shift the III-generation couplers cannot fully cancel.

Kodak discontinued 5294 in 1986, three years before the EXR generation arrived in 1989. Surviving stock is short-end resale from cold storage. Midwest Film and a handful of European resellers still find usable cans.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.1. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 6-second exposure becomes about 8 seconds at the negative. For motion picture work the correction never engages. For respool experimentation, fold it in.