Kodak Ektachrome 400

Kodak's ISO 400 daylight Ektachromes had a long life under different names. The consumer 400 Ektachrome arrived in 1979 in the wake of the 1976 E-6 introduction, and the line ended with the professional 400X (EPL) emulsion released in 1992 and discontinued in 2013 alongside the rest of the Ektachrome family. Across those decades the goal stayed the same: a tripod-free slide for indoor work, dim weddings, and fast outdoor shooting where slower Ektachromes ran out of shutter speed.

At box speed the 400X version had a noticeably warm bias and bright, saturated blues, to the point where skies regularly come back almost too cyan without a warming filter. Whites pick up a faint cyan tint that needs correcting in scan. Reds render darker than expected, which made it stronger for landscape than portrait work. If you wanted skin to look right at ISO 400, you reached for negative film: Portra 400NC or its predecessor. Provia 400X, the obvious Fuji peer, ran cleaner but warmer in skin tones.

The grain is visible in 35mm enlargements and acceptable in 120, where most working pros loaded it. T-Grain technology kept the grain finer than the older 1979 emulsion, but you do not get a slide that scans like Provia 100F or Velvia 50. That was the cost of the speed.

Kodak rated normal exposures from 1/10,000 second to 1 second, with filter corrections out to 10 seconds. Process is E-6 or its variants. Sold in 35mm and 120 with no sheet option, which kept it out of large-format workflows. Expired stock behaves predictably: shoot a stop overexposed and accept a magenta or yellow drift depending on storage.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve. A metered 30-second exposure becomes about 35 seconds at the negative, which is most of the math you encounter for tripod work. Color crossover past about ten seconds is a separate problem the curve does not solve; for proper long-exposure slide work, Provia 100F was always the better choice.