Lomography Babylon Kino 13

Babylon Kino is repackaged ORWO DN21, a duplicate-negative film originally engineered for making internegatives from master positives in cinema post-production. The edge markings on the film base confirm the origin. Lomography brought it to market in April 2020 as the fourth film in their Kino series, following Berlin (ORWO N74), Potsdam (UN54), and Fantome (DP31). The ISO 13 rating is not a marketing choice; it is what the stock actually does in pictorial daylight.

The character is wide tonal range and gentle contrast, the opposite of what most cinema stocks deliver. Internegative emulsions are designed to hold every step in the grayscale because their job is to preserve information that will get printed again. In a still camera you inherit that latitude. Highlights take work to clip; shadows hold detail down to the base fog. It is closer in feel to a copy film like CMS 20 II than to anything in the Tri-X or HP5+ lineage, but with a softer tonal response than CMS.

Development is where new users stumble. Lomography first recommended six minutes in D96 at 21 degrees, then revised the time to ten minutes at 20 degrees after early rolls came back thin. Rodinal works but is fussy at this speed. The stock prefers a developer that builds density without compressing the curve, which is what D96 was designed for in motion picture work.

At ISO 13 you are looking at tripod shots in anything other than bright daylight. A sunny f/16 scene meters to roughly 1/15 of a second, which puts handheld work at the edge of what wide-aperture optics can hold.

Available only in 35mm. No 120 release despite repeated user requests.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the calculation past one second, but the math returns the metered time unchanged. That is a remarkable feature for a film this slow: a four-minute waterfall exposure stays a four-minute exposure on the negative, the same property that makes Acros II famous. It is the one place the Kino origins help rather than complicate.