Kodak has introduced a new ISO 50 color negative film that provides excellent contrast, super-fine grain and good tolerance of over and under expsosure. What's the catch? It's a motion picture film. Dubbed Kodak Vision2 50D/5201/7201 it's currently available where better cinematographers shop. Like other movie films, it's designed to transfer well to digital. We call that scanning. Perhaps we'll see a still camera version of this stock now that still photo processing has become quite similar to movie camera processing in terms of digital transfer. But I doubt it. The return on investment would probably be too small. If you really want to try it, you might try contacting RGB on La Brea in Hollywood. They package movie film for still camera use and process it. I haven't contacted them in years, but in the past they didn't provide the very latest stocks.
By the way, from what I've read the cinematographers are not yet moving to digital in droves. Digital movie cameras apparently can't take advantage of RAW as can the still shooters, so exposure latitude suffers. Remember, a movie camera has to be capable of recording at least 100 frames per second when needed (although most work is shot at about 30 fps). That takes some serious processing speed if you're shooting digital. But the newest digital cameras are a huge improvement over the previous offerings, so it's probably just a matter of time. Paul
