ORWO NP22

NP22 was the export face of the East German film industry. VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen, the old Agfa plant the Soviets handed to the DDR after the war, coated NP22 and shipped it under the ORWO brand to Western retailers from the early 1960s through the early 1990s. The name comes from Original Wolfen, adopted in 1964 after trade agreements barred the plant from using the Agfa label outside the Eastern Bloc. Freestyle in Los Angeles stocked it through most of the eighties.

The character is unmistakably East European: high silver content, double gelatin coating, classic cubic-grain architecture that predates the tabular emulsions Kodak and Ilford moved to in the late seventies. Tonality runs long and flat in normal development, with a particular smoothness in the upper midtones that working photographers compared to old Plus-X. Grain is finer than you would expect from a 1960s ISO 125 stock and closer in feel to FP4+ than to Tri-X.

VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen liquidated in 1994 and new NP22 production ended with it. FilmoTec, the successor at the same Wolfen site, kept cinema stocks like N74 and UN54 alive but never resumed NP22. What circulates today is freezer stock from the late eighties and early nineties, sold by weight on eBay or as untested batch lots from European estate sales. Stored cold, the rolls hold up well. Rate at EI 80 or 64 to compensate for slow base fog.

Format coverage in production was 35mm, 120, and 4x5 sheet film. Surviving sheet stock is the rarest. Edge markings show only NP22 and a frame number.

D-76 at 1:1 for nine minutes hits the published curve closely. ID-11 works identically. Rodinal 1:50 gives more apparent sharpness at the cost of grain.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31, the conventional cubic-grain baseline. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, so a 30-second meter reading climbs to about 90 seconds at the negative. With expired stock that math sits on top of whatever speed loss your batch has incurred, so bracket when budget allows.