Kodak Vision2 100T 7212

5212 and its 16mm cousin 7212 sit at the slow end of the Vision2 tungsten range, and they are the sharpest color negative motion picture stocks Kodak ever made. That is not marketing language. The published RMS granularity is lower than every other Vision2 emulsion and the resolving power numbers track. ISO 100 at 3200K. If a production needed tungsten color but could light the scene hot enough to drop to a slow stock, this is what the gaffer ordered.

The credit list is heavy for a film many viewers never knew existed. Larry Fong loaded 5212 on 300 alongside the faster Vision2 tungsten when the scene called for a slow stock. Roger Deakins shot portions of No Country for Old Men on it. Watchmen, Mission Impossible III, Shutter Island, Star Trek (2009), and 300 all had 5212 cans on the truck when the scene was deep tungsten and the DP wanted the cleanest negative.

Vision2 launched in 2002 with the 500T 5218 and added the slow tungsten 5212 in 2004, all built on the two-electron sensitization technology that earned Kodak a Scientific and Technical Academy Award at the February 2008 ceremony. The chemistry put two electrons in play from a single incident photon, which translated into finer grain at the same effective speed than the original Vision line had managed. 5212 was the first of the line in this slow tungsten slot. Vision1 had skipped 100T entirely.

Compared with the Vision3 50D that exists today, 5212 ran a stop faster but at slightly larger grain because the underlying chemistry is one generation older. Compared with the Fujicolor F-64D 8522 daylight cinema stock that sat in a similar slow-speed slot at Fuji, the Vision2 100T held different but comparable specular highlights, with the Kodak picture leaning a touch warmer in skin.

Kodak discontinued 5212 and 7212 in 2010 when Vision3 superseded the line. ECN-2 is the only correct path. Rem-jet has to come off first. 35mm and 16mm only.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered three-second exposure becomes about three and a half seconds at the negative. Cinema cameras at 24 fps almost never push individual frames past 1/48th, so the correction matters only if you load short ends in a still camera.