Silver News

Kodak Announces High Sensitive Movie Film Without Graininess

Film makers have always had to compromise between highly sensitive film — necessary for low light situations — and the graininess that these films produced which became magnified on a large movie screen. Making a motion picture or TV commercial with low-light scenes or getting greater detail in the background scenes has meant compromising, accepting higher granularity.

Now, Kodak has a solution in its introduction of the Vision2 500T color negative 5218 film, a silver-halide technology, that delivers greater speed with finer grain.

“You can see the difference in movie stock and in commercial stock, and we’ll all enjoy the difference in the theaters,” said James Stoffel, Kodak senior vice president and chief technical officer. “This product is so much more than a tweaking of current technology.”

Simply, Kodak’s new two-electron sensitization makes use of the chemical potential stored in the oxidized dyes which are attached to the silver halide crystal. In conventional photography, subsequent reactions of the oxidized dyes to light are not controlled, but in this new technique, two electrons instead of one are absorbed by the crystal, thus doubling the speed of the film. The company holds six U.S. patents on the process.

Silver News - First Quarter 2003