ORWO NP15

ORWO NP15 is the slow end of the NP (Negativfilm Panchromatisch) line that VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen ran from 1964 until the company liquidated in 1994. Wolfen was the old AGFA factory on the East German side of the postwar division; ORWO is short for ORiginal WOlfen. NP15 specifically was the 15 DIN / ISO 25 panchromatic negative, the slowest of the camera films in the lineup. It was used by the same East Bloc photographers who shot Exakta and Praktica bodies through the Cold War, including the kind of formal still life and architectural work that the Wolfen factory cultivated as a house style.

The character is fine-grained, contrasty, and slightly harsher in the highlights than Western competitors of the same speed. Western reviewers in the 1970s and 1980s tended to put it up against Adox KB 14 and Ilford Pan F, and the consensus was that NP15 ran higher contrast with shadow detail that held better than the contrast suggested. The emulsion was cubic crystal, no tabular or T-grain technology, with a thicker silver coating than late-1980s Western stocks of comparable speed.

Developers used at the time were ORWO R09 (a close cousin of Rodinal, since R09 stands for Rodinal formula number 9, a postwar revision used by Calbe and other former Rodinal distributors after the Agfa split) and ORWO A49, a fine-grain Metol-Glycin developer derived from Agfa's prewar Atomal formula. Rodinal 1:50 still works fine on surviving stock. If you have rolls in the freezer, expect a bit of fog after thirty years and pull half a stop to clean it up.

Production ended with the rest of the Wolfen lineup in the mid-1990s. What you find today is freezer stock from photographers who stockpiled in the 1980s, plus the occasional fresh sealed cassette that turns up on German eBay. Lomography sold a small batch of expired NP15 in 120 a few years ago. The current ORWO operation (Filmotec, then InovisCoat) makes UN54 and N74plus, not NP15.

Thirty-five millimeter cassettes were the common format, with 120 and large format available through specialist distribution. Nothing is in current production under the NP15 name.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.33, the steeper end for a modern B&W stock. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve. A 10-second meter reading runs to about 23 seconds at the negative; a 30-second exposure climbs to roughly 96 seconds. At ISO 25 in anything less than direct sun, the one-second threshold comes up immediately on stopped-down lenses, so the correction is part of normal use.