EG&G film

[AgX]

In a listing of films available to the amateur in the USA from 1970 I found the
„XR Extended Range Film“ from EG&G.

Based on the description this seemed to be a b&w, chromogenic, extended-latitude film.
This would have been years before market introduction of Agfa’s Agfapan Vario XL film which is generally considered the first of this kind.

Does anyone can give information on that EG&G film?

 

[dynachrome]

EG&G

From a Google search it looks like this was a scientific film and perhaps used also to record X-rays. It does not show up as a chromogenic film. The Agfa Vario XL was an interesting film. When it came out, film processing was more evenly split between large central labs and minilabs. Years later when Kodak, Ilford and Konica brought out their chromogenic b&w films the split was more in favor of minilabs. This made the novelty factor high because you could get b&w negatives and prints as fast as you could get color ones. The main problem was that the minilab would often make prints with some kind of unwanted color cast. I have used chromogenic films a few times and made prints in a wet darkroom. Today you can simply scan color negatives and make b&w prints from them so the novelty of chromogenic b&w film has mostly worn off.

 

[mts]

XR was indeed an extended range black & white film in which the layers produced overlapping characteristic curves. It was designed and used for recording certain aspects of nuclear detonations, for example in streak camera photography. Sensitometry was difficult to perform for this film. We actually used little of it preferring instead to mount multiple cameras with ND filters that accomplished the same recording of a large luminosity range. In the late 1960s EG&G and LASL had a close working relationship with Kodak to produce several emulsions for scientific photography.