Kodak Ektachrome VNF 125T 7240

7240 is Kodak's Video News Film, the tungsten Ektachrome that ran through every TV station's ENG cameras through the late 1970s and into the 1980s before videotape ate the news business. Tungsten balanced at roughly 3200K, rated EI 125, built for fast broadcast turnaround. Kodak introduced the modern 7240 around 1975 and kept it in production until the end of 2004, with the Super 8 cartridge marketed from September 1997 through final discontinuation.

The processing chain is the catch. 7240 was built for Process VNF-1, Kodak's stripped-down derivative of Process ME-4 that eliminated the prehardener and neutralizer steps to make station-side processing faster. By around 2013 nobody was running VNF-1 commercially. Remaining frozen 7240 can be cross-processed in E-6 with a yellow shift, or in C-41 for muddy color-negative results. Neither gives you what the film was designed to render.

At EI 125 under tungsten the original VNF-1 produced a saturated, slightly warm reversal image that projected directly off the processor with the magnetic sound stripe intact. That sound stripe is the giveaway you have a real 7240 reel and not some other Ektachrome cut. News crews loved it because they could shoot a fire at 8pm and have it on the 11pm broadcast.

Compared to Ektachrome Commercial 7252 or the contemporary 7250 high-speed tungsten Ektachrome, 7240 traded a bit of fine grain for the simplified VNF-1 chemistry and shorter processing time. For nighttime news and tungsten-lit industrial work, that tradeoff was worth it.

Formats were 16mm 100-foot and 400-foot rolls (often with magnetic sound stripe) and Super 8 50-foot cartridges. The 35mm cine sibling was 5240, sold to the same VNF-1 spec under the combined 5240/7240 datasheet, but there was no still format. Fully discontinued.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure becomes about 13 seconds at the negative. For ENG news at 24 or 30 frames per second the math never mattered. For anyone using surviving rolls today, reciprocity is the least of the headaches with thirty-year-old reversal stock.