Getting to know Cinestill 400D

Sometime last year I backed the Cinestill campaign to bring 400D to the market. If you’ve not heard of Cinestill, they sellrepurposed Kodak Vision film (the one used for making motion films) for still photography use. In a nutshell: they process EC2N motion film so that it can be processed in C41 chemistry. EC2N is a process specific for motion film. C41 is a standard colour negative film process for still photography.

So far they had 50D (daylight) and 800T (tungsten) films. I have used both for a while in the past and particularly liked 50D, it has a very smooth clean look and the EC2N-to-C41 processing makes it produce some reddish halos around high contrast areas, giving it a distinct look. However 50D is quite slow so was really excited to hear about the new 400D.

The campaign was successful, they released 400D in 35mm, 120 and even 4x5. I’m still waiting for the box of 4x5 to arrive but last summer I got my 4 rolls of 400D. Here are some of the shots, all shoot with a Canon EOS 1N and a 50/1.8 STM.

Hope they give you a bit of a feel on what it looks like, obviously plenty more samples are available on instagram from Cinestill themselves! Thanks for reading.