Cs6 "Creative Slide" kits from Cinestill

So Cinestill announced something pretty unique that I thought would be interesting to see some discussion around here. Basically they made a positive process E-6 kit, but instead labeled Cs6 with a choice between 3 different 1st developers:

1. "Daylight chrome" appears to be the standard E-6 experience
2. "Tungsten chrome" will give a blue tilt and seems to cause daylight films to be usable with correct color balance and without filtration under tungsten lighting
3. "Dynamic chrome" gives much lower contrast slides and appears to extend from the 6 stop dynamic range standard to 9 stops, but importantly seems to give mostly correct (daylight) color balance while doing this.

Link is here along with MSDS etc: https://cinestillfilm.com/collectio...iming-chrome-reversal-and-e-6-compatible-film

From the MSDS the big chemistry differences I see:

* Daylight chrome uses hydroquinone monosulfonate, known to be a component in the official E-6 formulas
* Tungsten chrome uses hydroquinone, which has been reported around here to work for a first developer but is definitely not official. Also includes lithium hydroxide
* Dynamic chrome uses hydroquinone and borax with a much lower pH aim than the other formulas which all use carbonate and hydroxide

Anyway, look forward to hearing the thoughts on these. I think it's a very interesting concept, even if a bit sacrilege

I have not used these (haven't even developed E-6 myself) but I'm super glad that there are companies out there that want to innovate. It's easy to keep film alive if we do things as they have always been done, but innovation can make everything so much better. I haven't bought any, but I'm excited for more people to try this out and see if Cinestill has made something worthwhile.

Yeah I think it's interesting for sure! The quantities and cost in particular is very compelling. I'm willing to put down my "bleach and fix not blix" pitchfork too since the cost is so good and I'm very curious about the Dynamic developer. From what I can tell, the are also including the Pre-Bleach step (required to create the formalin, as I understand it anyway, and stabilize the dye layers without having to use a stabilizer directly) which means it should be reasonably archival. Though I did ask CS about this just to be sure. The instructions indicate you can use a conventional stabilizer or Photo-Flo (and I assume the C-41 Final Rinse may work as well, though they didn't mention this in the instructions).

Another thread on the same subject started this morning.
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/how-does-color-timing-e-6-with-the-first-dev-work.175333/

peter k. said:

Another thread on the same subject started this morning.
https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/how-does-color-timing-e-6-with-the-first-dev-work.175333/

Click to expand...

Doh! if a mod sees this feel free to merge etc. I skimmed through the front page of the forum before posting and didn't see anything I thought was related