Kodak · ISO 50 Cinema
Kodak EXR 50D 5245
EXR 50D 5245 is the slow daylight negative Kodak introduced in 1989 alongside the rest of the EXR family, the T-grain generation that earned Kodak a Scientific or Technical Academy Award of Merit in March 1990 and replaced the Eastman Color High Speed stocks of the early 1980s. The pitch was finer grain at every speed, and 5245 was the showcase. Micro-fine grain, very high sharpness, wide latitude. The kind of slow daylight stock you put on a tripod in midday for the resolving power.
The films that ran 5245 read like a 1990s rental shelf. Andrzej Sekula on Pulp Fiction in 1994. Dean Cundey on Jurassic Park in 1993. Russell Carpenter on True Lies in 1994. Adam Greenberg on Terminator 2 in 1991. David Tattersall on Phantom Menace in 1999. Phil Meheux on GoldenEye in 1995. The slow speed limited it to bright exteriors and well-lit interiors, but in those situations the negatives held detail the faster EXR stocks could not match.
Daylight balance is the 5600K kind, so under tungsten you need an 80A filter or a two-stop loss. The published tungsten rating is EI 12, which essentially rules it out for indoor available light. The clear acetate base carries a rem-jet backing that must be removed in ECN-2 processing. Compared with the Vision2 50D 5201 that eventually replaced it in 2005, the EXR 5245 sits slightly grainier and slightly cooler in skin tones. The Vision iteration was the smoother stock; 5245 has the harder edge that defines its era.
Kodak discontinued 5245 in 2006 after a long run. Short ends and cold-stored cans circulate at film resellers and on eBay. Mono No Aware in New York holds technical PDFs on it for archive purposes. Lomography users have pulled it from estate sales for cross-process and respool experiments with usable results.
Reciprocity exponent is 1.1. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 8-second exposure becomes about 10 seconds at the negative. For the daylight tripod work this stock was designed for, that correction routinely matters at f/22.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 50. Picker exposes pull/push chips so you can shoot it at any speed you want and the meter follows.
- Reciprocity: Above one second the app raises metered time to the power of 1.10.
- Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. Cinema decay rates are baked in.