Eastman Kodak has been hard at work making what might seem to be a minor change to its Vision 3 film stock. Except that, what seems to be minor actually turns out to be quite major.
You would have thought that in a world of digital that film stock design would stay pretty static, but Kodak has invested eight years and a not inconsiderable sum of money completely redesigning its Vision 3 film stock.
At the heart of the new version of Vision 3 is the removal of the remjet layer. The remjet layer acted as an anti-halation and anti-static layer, as well as acting as a lubricantion layer while the film was being transported through motion picture cameras.
Processing film stock with a remjet layer requires some specialised steps during and sometimes after processing, which when it comes to Super 8 film makes it challenging for small labs or DIY development. By removing the remjet layer it has become possible for developers to use the simpler C-41 process, instead of the more complex ECN-2 system, thus opening up film development more widely to DIY home enthusiasts and smaller photographic labs.
However, removing the remjet layer from the film stock hasn't been an easy task. Kodak not only needed to replace it with a different anti-halation system, but it also required a complete redesign of the layering system within the film stock in order to keep the same overall film thickness.
The new system is called AHU (Anti-halation Undercoat), and instead of forming part of the base layers like remjet, it now forms part of the emulsion layers. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Doing this meant that the existing emulsion layers needed to be made thinner, which in turn meant totally recalibrating them so that there wouldn't be any unwanted colour shifts or exposure differences from the previous version of the stock. The fact that it has taken eight years of research and testing to reach this point is a testament to how complicated the new change has been to implement.
The new changes will be implemented across all Vision 3 film stocks, from Super 8mm all the way up to 65mm. While it won't have so much impact on high end film development labs, the redesign does mean that smaller 8mm and 16mm processing labs will have a much easier time, while home based amateurs now have the doors open to them for simpler development processing. Could it also mean that film processing might now come down in price? We'll see.
The new version of Vision 3 shows that R&D in film isn't dead by any stretch, and the word is that Kodak might also be introducing a version of its Portra film stock in motion picture format at a later date.