Kodak Eastmancolor Negative 5247

Two films have worn the 5247 label. The first arrived in 1950 as Kodak's original incorporated-color-coupler camera negative, an EI 16 daylight stock that defined what Eastmancolor meant until 5248 replaced it two years later. The label sat dormant until 1974, when Kodak relaunched it as Eastman Color Negative II 5247, tungsten-balanced at EI 100 with EI 64 daylight behind a Wratten 85B filter. The second 5247 is the one anybody outside SMPTE history rooms means when they say the number.

The 1974 reissue ran on the new ECN-2 process with EDTA bleach, replacing the older ferricyanide chemistry. Kodak presented the technical paper at SMPTE that year and the film went into production cameras almost immediately. It defined the look of 1970s and 1980s cinema. Star Wars was shot on it. Empire Strikes Back, Apocalypse Now, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Shining, and Jaws all ran 5247 through their A-cameras. The warm shadows and saturated reds and slightly soft grain you remember from that era are 5247 properties.

Grain is finer and sharper than the 5254 stock it replaced, with more contrast and what cinematographers called punchy reds. The trade is push performance. 5254 handled lab pushes better, which is why Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon on the older stock. For ordinary production work the 5247 finer grain mattered more, and the industry moved.

Kodak ran 5247 through the late 1980s before EXR and Vision pushed it aside. Production formats were 35mm 5247 and 16mm 7247. Short ends turn up through dealers like Motipix for still photographers willing to run ECN-2. Forty-plus year old film has lost speed and the dyes drift toward magenta-green crossovers. Most expired-stock users rate it at EI 32 to 50.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 30-second exposure becomes about 60 seconds at the negative. For 1970s production work, exposures past a second were rare. For modern still use on recans, the correction matters whenever you bracket past ten seconds.