A German company is now offering a range of cinema films for 35mm cameras – and the price also includes processing in true ECN2 chemicals.
Silbersalz, a Stuttgart-based advertising and film production company, is offering four packs of film in four different varieties – 50 and 250-ISO daylight-balanced film and 200 and 500-ISO tungsten-balanced film, all produced from Kodak motion-picture stock.
Silbersalz is marketing the new range as Silbersalz35. Each pack includes four rolls of film sent in a hard plastic case and the cost of ECN2 processing and scanning for €39.99, though this price doesn’t include the negatives sent back to you. If you want your negatives returned, a four-pack costs €49.99.
On the site’s FAQ, Silbersalz says the films cannot be processed by local labs and have to be sent back to their lab in Germany for processing. Silbersalz says after film arrives, high-res 21MB scans are sent back to the customer within 14 days.
The more expensive scan and negative return option sees negatives returned two weeks later “to ensure we can rescan the film”.
Below are a handful of example images taken from the Silbersalz site:
Unlike the Cinestill range of films, which have been reformulated so that they can be processed in conventional C41 chemistry, the films need to be processed in ECN2 chemicals, the process used for motion pictures stock.
“The Cinestill proprietary “Premoval” process makes motion picture film safe to process in standard C-41 photo chemicals. Our tests show that C-41 processing results in degraded colour and contrast rendition,” Silbersalz says in its FAQ.
“Silbersalz35 are the actual, unchanged motion picture stocks used for films like ‘Dunkirk’,’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ or ‘Wonder Woman’, with true cinefilm chemical processing (ECN2). For scanning we are also using state-of-the-art cine equipment. For digital post processing we only use our own unique colour science.”
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Why could this film not be processed in ecn2 chemistry by yourself? It is available.