I've just got back my three first rolls of E64T from processing, cutaways for a TV documentary, and have been in deep shock ever since! This film is absolutely horrible! The grain is really big and the details aren't good. Actually it seems like there are ants running on the picture - so grainy is the picture. I wouldn't even mention this film in the same sentence with the good old K40 which was a proper quality film with unnoticeable grain.
The colours are another matter! Gone are the vivid, pulsating colours of K40, come the saturated and pale colours. I used an external 85B filter with all the films so this is what Kodak thinks the colours should be like. All the rolls were filmed with Nizo S800 so the exposure should have also been correct and the camera definitely isn't the weakest link of the shooting. Is this what the film really is like? The films were bought from the Widescreen Centre in London and processed there (or sent somewhere else for processing) - is it just that I had a bad lab?
My shock was so great that I'm actually thinking of giving up S8 filming completely, at least colour filming, especially as most of my cameras can't handle ISO 64 and have to use external 85B filters. If the quality is actually this bad I'm not gonna use this format any more (at least in colour). I can't think of anything else than the superior quality of K40 - it didn't really matter what kind of camera you had, my most beautiful shots ever were taken with a Sankyo pocket camera in a canooing trip in Finland. E64T has killed my dear hobby!
After spending all my miserable pennies to S8 equipment for years the only option I can think now is to move to Single-8. Cheers a lot for this, Kodak!
