ReflxLab 500T

ReflxLab 500T is fresh Kodak Vision3 5219 motion picture stock respooled for 35mm still cameras with the remjet anti-halation backing left intact. That detail matters. Unlike most still-photography rerolls of Vision3, ReflxLab keeps the remjet in place, which means the film cannot run in C-41 and needs ECN-2, the actual cinema chemistry not stocked at the average consumer lab.

Leaving remjet on has real consequences. The good ones first: no red halation bloom around point light sources, because the anti-halation layer is doing its job exactly as Kodak engineered it. Highlights stay clean. Grain reads tighter than 800T because Vision3 500T is one of Kodak's lowest-grain tungsten cine stocks. Saturation is medium and skin tones lean truthful under tungsten.

The inconvenient ones: you need an ECN-2 lab, which in most countries is a single specialty operator with mail-in turnaround. Cinelab in the UK and a handful of US shops handle it. Cost runs higher than C-41 by a wide margin. Some labs cross-process to C-41 on request for a more contrasty result with shifted color and added grain, but the chemistry strips the remjet violently and can stain other rolls in the same machine.

As a tungsten stock it is designed for indoor and night use under warm light. In daylight it reads strongly blue and needs an 85B warming filter to bring it back to roughly ISO 320 daylight equivalent. Or let the cast happen and call it a choice. Most night street photographers shoot it unfiltered under sodium and tungsten streetlights and accept the warmth.

Available in 35mm, 36 exposures per roll, in ReflxLab's screw-top aluminum canister, and also as a 120 medium-format roll respooled from 65mm cine stock. Compared with the source 5219 in a cine camera, the still version through ECN-2 looks identical to the master emulsion.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 10-second meter reading lands at about 13 seconds at the negative; a 30-second reading climbs to roughly 40 seconds. Past a minute the cine curve becomes less precise. Bracket.