Examples of 16mm Kodak 7222 Eastman Double-X pushed a stop?

[Owen A. Davies]

I'm in pre-production on a black and white 16mm film and plan to shoot with an ISO of around 400 to 500. I know that Kodak 7222 Eastman Double-X has a slightly smaller amount of dynamic range compared to Kodak’s VISION3 stock, which is why I’m torn between shooting on Kodak 7219 VISON3 500T and simply creating a monochrome black and white color grade in DaVinci, or alternatively shooting with 7222 and having it pushed a stop (400-500 EI). I am curious to see what 7222 looks like on either 16mm or Super16 when it’s pushed a stop, and how the push processing affects characteristics such as 7222’s dynamic range, contrast, resolution, and granularity compared to pushing VISION3 stocks. 

[Giray Izcan]

7222 is already a very grainy stock on 16 so pushing it would make it even worse..

[Dirk DeJonghe]

Most of my customers end up exposing the 7222 as 125 ISO, not more. Pushing one stop will increase the gamma from 0.65 to 0.75 but gain not more than 1/2 stop in speed.

[Giray Izcan]

Dirk,

Black and white negative I think gets a little grainier as you overexpose unlike color negative film. Interesting.  In the past, when I shot double x, I always rated it at its box speed to mitigate for extra grain. At the time, for me, it was really going against the grain not overexposing the negative, but I got used to it.

[Owen A. Davies]

12 hours ago, Giray Izcan said:

7222 is already a very grainy stock on 16 so pushing it would make it even worse..

I suppose what I'd really want to know, in that case, is how grainy compared to current 500T?

Edited December 6, 2025 by Owen A. Davies
Typo

[Giray Izcan]

Owen,

7219 is incomparably cleaner than 7222 in my opinion.

[Chris Burke]

On 12/6/2025 at 7:43 PM, Giray Izcan said:

Owen,

7219 is incomparably cleaner than 7222 in my opinion.

Agreed. 7219 will look almost digital when compared side by side to 7222.  Why do you want to push one stop. The box speed of 250 is plenty for B&W. Have you tested at 250 iso?

[Gautam Valluri]

On 12/5/2025 at 10:40 PM, Owen A. Davies said:

I'm in pre-production on a black and white 16mm film and plan to shoot with an ISO of around 400 to 500.

Just wondering if you've considered the ORWO N74? It's a 400 ASA film. Although, my friends have had some slippage issues using it in an Eclair ACL2.

If you're going to go the 7219 route, I remember reading that the cinematographer of The Happiest Day in the life of Olli Maki, J-P Passi had bleach-bypassed 500T to match the Tri-X footage of the rest of the film. You could probably even underexpose it slightly, maybe at 640 ASA or 800 ASA to increase the grain.

Do keep us posted on what you end up using and share test results with us. I'm also prepping a film where I will be using a mix of 7207 and 7219, de-saturated to B&W in post.

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

You are in pre-production and want to shoot your film on replies from the forum?

Throw some $ at it. Buy the films that you are interested in. Push 1 stop. 1.5 stop, 2 stops. If you got some extra $, pull 1 stop as well. Get them scanned and post results to the Internet Archive. 

 

[Gautam Valluri]

On 12/9/2025 at 3:25 PM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You are in pre-production and want to shoot your film on replies from the forum?

It's perfectly reasonable to ask if someone has done it already and to ask to share examples of the results. If it turns out that it's completely unusable, he could save costs and time in his pre-prod.

[August Strada]

Just in case, this is a reference about how grain behaves when underexposing Eastman Double-X 7222:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kok8mWyOUsc
(pushing will add even more grain)

Notice that below the rated ISO (for development to a gamma of 0.65) the film response curve looks kind of flat when developed with D-96. This is because motion picture negative expects to be printed for projection on a color print film. Developed with D-96 under standard specs, Double-X dynamic range is about 12-13 stops. Just for explicative purposes, this is an emulation of the "standard" look of the Double-X 7222 (negative-only):

Double-X has a very flexible contrast and extremely good latitude so there's enough room there for getting nice results under different lighting conditions. When printed for projection, tonal contrast is increased. It would look something like this: 

The color cast is due to the color print film -some times this color cast from the positive film and also sometimes from the negative (due to developer processing or scanning) may fulfill some narrative purposes and you may want to keep it. But let's switch to monochrome for these previews:

Sub-exposing by one stop is indeed too much if you are planning pushing by one stop:

This is because pushing the film is not perceptually uniform, the process primarily affects the highlights and mid-tones, so sub-exposing by half a stop keeps better the original exposure perception (midpoint):

This is how it would look like printed:

A lot more grain. But it's a nice classic cubic grain. Some labs might may use a stock solution (undiluted developer) for a smoother grain, but it tends to soften the image too and blown out highlights. Guess these are topics you may want to discuss with your lab beforehand. 
  
Vision3 500T 7219 on the other hand, it's about 15 stops (which is around the double or quadruple of more tonal values) displaying a flatter log curve:

Printed would look something like this:

You'll have more details in shadows and highlights but also less tonal contrast. 500T 7219 has a lot less grain too (even less than some old 35mm films) due to the tabular grain structure and also probably to ADL technology, but once scanned at 16-bits, no colorist would have any issue matching the Double-X 7222 response curve - sharpness and grain may be other story though. 

So another pretty good option suggested could be bleach-by-passing the 500T 7219. Depending on the lab, there are several advanced options for silver retention, but we are talking here about the standard "skipping the bleach" process. There are a couple of stages where applying this processing may be interesting in this case. The first one is bleach-bypassing the original camera negative in order to get 100% of silver retention (this is about up to 240 IR of D-max), so in order to keep the midpoint (same original perceptual exposure), an EI of 1 stop above the rated ISO was necessary in this case, it would look like this:

Highlights are stronger and blacks are deeper, granularity also almost match, though micro-contrast and the perceptual sharpness is not as high at lower frequencies as with pushed Double-X 7222.

Another option would be bleach-bypassing the internegative (same exposure compensation was necessary), which would look something like this:

Grain is a bit finer, highlights details are more retained and blacks are even deeper. Guess it all depends on the look you are aiming for. Since there's no two labs delivering the same results (which is a good thing), bleach by-pass is a processing you may want to discuss with your lab to consider what type of tests you need to do.

Don't want to boring you with another test, but there's another possible option you may want to consider. Instead of going with Visio3n 500T 7219, you might try a more contrasty film stock like 250D 7207, which may place you more near to Double-X 7222 response curve, but still keeping the dynamic range of Vision3 stocks. The result would look something like this:

Similar than with 500T, sharpness and microcontrast won't match Double-X. Think Double-X being very flexible film stock and behaving extremely well under different lighting conditions would be an excellent (and straightforward) choice if that's the final look you are aiming for.