ORWO UP27

UP27 is the high-speed counterpart to UP15 in the ORWO reversal line. The 27 is 27 DIN, which translates to ISO 400. Same Umkehrfilm Panchromatisch designation, same VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen origin, same fate when the Wolfen complex was liquidated in 1994. Where UP15 was the slow, fine-grained option for daylight cine work, UP27 was the indoor and overcast-day stock that East German hobbyists loaded for school plays, family events, and the low light that Northern European winters drop on you for six months a year.

Grain at ISO 400 is visible, structured, salt-and-pepper in the way you would expect from a 1970s emulsion that predates T-grain by a decade. Contrast tends to run high in normal reversal processing, which is partly an artifact of the chemistry ORWO supplied to its approved labs. When developed as a negative in conventional black and white chemistry (D-76, Rodinal, ID-11), the contrast drops and the curve straightens, which is how many surviving rolls get used today.

The practical comparison inside ORWO's own catalog is to NP27, the negative version of the same speed rating. NP27 was the workhorse 400-speed negative film and got far wider use. UP27 was always the cine sibling. Outside ORWO, the closest analog is Tri-X reversal in the 1970s, or Foma R100 pushed two stops.

Format was primarily 16mm and 2x8mm Double-8 for cine projection, with limited 35mm runs that occasionally surface. The current ORWO operation under Filmotec makes N74plus at ISO 400, which is positioned as the modern descendant of the high-speed Wolfen B&W tradition, though it is not the same emulsion. If you are buying UP27 today you are buying decades-old stock with the fog and base shift that thirty-plus years on a shelf produces.

Development recommendations from old ORWO data sheets used reversal chemistry. For negative processing today, D-76 at 1:1 for around 8 minutes is the safe starting point. Bracket aggressively. Expired motion picture reversal is rarely consistent roll to roll.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.31, the silver-grain baseline. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve. A 10-second meter reading runs to about 21 seconds at the negative; a 30-second exposure climbs to roughly 89 seconds. Given the speed of the film and its cine intent, long exposures were never the design target, so the correction is conservative rather than experimentally validated.