Developing Eastman Color 5254 from the 70s

[FilmCurlCom]

Hi everybody!

I've found a really nice and old Eastman Color 5254 in a 135 cartridge on Ebay, see the attached image.
I asked Dale Labs (which is mentioned on the catridge) and was told the lab's boss confirmed the catridge actually was prepared by them, sometime in the 1970s it seems.

Now I'd be curious if I could successfully shoot something with it and develop it at home, but this seems to be ECN film (not ECN-2) and I won't be able to find any chemicals for this anymore.

Could I use this with modern black and white chemistry? Then I could even shoot each subject 3 times, through red, green and blue filters and in the end put it together to a color image again or at least have some B&W images.

What do you think? Could using modern black and white chemicals work? I assume this also has a remjet I need to get rid of at the start.

I only have this one single catridge and would like to get the most out of it.

Bernhard

 

[FilmCurlCom]

Hi everybody!

Doesn't anyone have any suggestions, ideas, anything?

Bernhard

 

[Konical]

Good Morning, FilmCurlCom,

I doubt that any effort you put into using this film will be worthwhile given its age and the difficulty of removing the ramjet backing. It might be more sensible simply to keep the single cartridge as an interesting artifact of 1970's photographic history.

Perhaps shooting five or six frames and processing in your favorite B & W developer would be informative and give you an idea of whether or not to use the rest of the film. I suspect that getting any usable results is unlikely.

Konical

 

[georgegrosu]

Eastman Color 5254 was ECN-1 process and is not compatible with the current ECN-2 process.
I will try to find recipes for the ECN-1 process.

George

 

[railwayman3]

I'm all for experimenting, but in this case I'd totally agree with Konical, above, and, personally, just keep the single cartridge as a collectors' item. Even if the film required a modern process where the correct chemicals were readily available, e.g. C-41, I doubt that any 40+ year-old colour film is going to give anything worthwhile.

 

[FilmCurlCom]

I think I will just cut off 6 frames in my dark room and spool them onto a reloadable cartridge. This way I could take 2x3 images, so find 2 nice subjects and shoot them through R, G and B filters, then develop in B&W, maybe I get something out of this, maybe even color can be reconstructed with the R/G/B separations. If I unspool the complete film in the dark and cut off the 6 frames at the end of the spool and reattach the rest, I can spool the rest back and it still has the original leader that sticks out of the original cartridge and it wouldn't look altered in anyway. So I can both try the film and still keep it as an (almost original) artifact.

 

[Konical]

Good Afternoon, Bernhard,

It would be much simpler to shoot a few frames from the existing cartridge, then take the camera into the darkroom, remove the exposed section, load it into a processing tank, and keep the remaining film where it is. You can always cut a new leader should the need arise.

Konical

 

[FilmCurlCom]

Good afternoon to you too!

Of course you are right, but I thought that by taking film from the end rather than from the start I could keep the "original leader" exactly how it was cut by Dale Labs back in the 70s, you know, to still have it as an artifact of its time in case the actual photos don't work out Also there might have happened some light leaks onto the first frames maybe, who knows how tight the cartridge still is after those decades. Let's see, I will report what I did once I got to it.
By the way, I heared that a rule of thumb is to substract 1 stop for each decade, so should I plan for around 4-5 stops less (1970 to 2016), that would make the ISO 100 a ISO 6 or ISO 3.

 

[georgegrosu]

I have not found the book with old networks but I found the manual for sensitometric control and chemical analysis.
At the developer appear - benzyl alcohol.
From my memories - perhaps as contains Citrazinic acid.

George