ORWO · ISO 400 B&W negative
ORWO N74 Plus
N74+ is the current Wolfen production black and white, an ISO 400 motion-picture stock that survived the collapse of the East German film industry by virtue of being a cine emulsion rather than a still one. The Bitterfeld plant has been coating film since Agfa built it in 1910. After VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen entered liquidation in 1994, the successor company FilmoTec kept the cinema line running, and N74 has stayed on the catalog without a break. The plus designation refers to a 2010s recoating refinement, not a fundamental redesign.
Lomography repackages the same stock as Berlin Kino 400. If you have shot Berlin Kino, you have shot N74+ under a different box and a different price tag. The base is a 135-micron grey-tinted triacetate safety support, the same family used on most cinema negative stocks. The film sits flat in the gate and reports of thick, well-behaved base material are common in user reviews.
Character is high-silver cubic grain with a contrasty curve, the inheritance of DDR-era Wolfen chemistry. Compared with Kodak Double-X 5222, N74+ reads softer in the highlights and slightly less aggressive in the shadows. Against Ilford HP5+ at the same EI, the grain pattern is more structured and the midtones land a touch warmer in the scan. The cine origins show in how the film handles flat overcast where a still-engineered emulsion would block.
Development is conventional. D-76 at 1:1 for nine minutes gives a clean reference. Rodinal at 1:50 punches the grain harder than most pictorial workers want. Avoid high-acutance developers when the cinematic grain character is the reason you bought the film.
Available in 35mm 36-exposure cartridges through ORWO's online shop and specialty dealers in Europe and the US. The 16mm cine version is the working format for filmmakers. No 120, no sheet.
Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, so a 30-second meter reading runs to about 90 seconds at the negative. For night work where N74+ tends to get pointed, the threshold comes up routinely.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 400. 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.