Kodak · ISO 1000 B&W negative
Kodak Recording Film 2475
Recording Film 2475 was never meant for art. Kodak built it for police surveillance and for oscilloscope trace photography, two applications that share a need for ASA speeds nobody else was offering in the 1970s. The published box rating was 1000, but the published guidance covered exposure indices between 1000 and 4000, with 3200 listed as the sweet spot. Erik Gould wrote up his long history with the film for EMULSIVE in 2018, describing the ISO 1250 emulsion and his Pyro-Tri development routine.
The base is Estar-AH polyester. Anyone who has handled the stuff remembers it. The film curls hard when dry and resists flattening, which makes it a pain in roll-film cameras and worse on a contact printing easel. Coupled with the polyester base was a panchromatic emulsion with extended red sensitivity, originally engineered so plainclothes officers could shoot under tungsten streetlights and still pull recognizable faces. That red-extended response is also why available-light photojournalists liked it for indoor work where tungsten dominated.
The grain pattern got nicknamed "golf-ball" by users who saw enlargements. Clumpy, cubic, large, but the film maintained surprising acutance for the speed. P3200 has tighter grain in the same speed neighborhood; 2475 has the structured, gritty character that some shooters still chase. Cleaner shadow separation than 2484, looser highlight handling than Tri-X pushed two stops.
Kodak quietly discontinued the film around 2000 after T-MAX P3200 absorbed the available-light segment. Remaining stock circulates on eBay and through specialty resellers like The Celluloid Collective. Most of it is 35mm bulk rolls or factory-loaded 36-exposure cassettes; there was no 120 or sheet version.
Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter folds the correction in past one second on the standard curve, so a 30-second meter reading becomes about 90 seconds at the negative. At ASA 1000 indoors that threshold is uncommon, but for night street work pushed to f/8 it will come up.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 1000. 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 1.31.
- Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. B&W negative decay rates are baked in.