And it’s fun being a researcher!
I saw these numbers on the edge of the roll of Lomography Cine 200 film that I shot for this season of Petzval Week and didn’t know what they were.
I expected it was some kind of code that might reveal who manufactured the film stock used for the Cine 200 line, but didn’t think too much of it until I came across this one a couple of frames later:
So it’s a Fuji stock.
To the search bar I went.
My first search for “fuji 250 823 008 594814” returned a bunch of stuff in French. I did take a course in French for Reading Comprehension back in grad school, but the results I saw above the fold pointed to financial documents that I might find of interest in my day job, but that have nothing to do with film stocks.
So I tried again. “Fuji 250” would’ve been too general, I think. Since I knew that Lomography’s Cine line is made up of repurposed movie film stocks, I tried “fuji 250 movie film.”
Bingo! A pdf of Fuji’s motion picture film stocks.
The film stock in question is Fujicolor Eterna 250, a Tungsten-balanced stock designed for shooting under tungsten lamps (like ordinary household ‘soft white’ bulbs… I realize now that that doesn’t mean much anymore: Oh well: tungsten = 3200K = those LED bulbs with the orange plastic bit over the LEDs that tuns the light sort of orangy), which is probably why images shot indoors—like the one of my darling, adorable wife—with this film are so much easier to color correct.
Since the roll with that picture of my wife had no edge markings, I can’t be positive that the film stocks used are the same, but the marketing around the Cine 200 suggests that it is.
Lomography is sold out of the Cine 200. They have some Cine 50 available at $12.50/roll. I think I’ll skip that one: I have about 20 rolls of film that I need to shoot through as is, and I really need to not let my GAS take over and use what I have to get better rather than buying more things to test or play with.
As far as research projects go, this was easy.
