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Mystery 35-mm film

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Doug Kerr

Guest
I recently acquired a nice Kodak Retina Ia (Type 010) foldng full-frame 35-mm camera (made in early 1949 as near as I can tell from the serial number). From the feel of the wind and rewind knobs, I could tell that there was film in it, which I duly rewound. (It took a lot of rewinding!)

I opened the back to find a nice Kodak 20-exposure 135 cartridge marked "Panatomic X". I sent it off to be developed, asking that the negative be returned uncut and that the empty cartidge also be returned, which indeed happened.

The negative had very bad large-scale "blotching" from end to end. It looked as if 4 shots had been taken, one of which looks as if it will produce a usable image, and one almost so. I will scan the negative and wallop the images to see what I can get. Evidently the film had been "wound on" quite a bit after the last real shoot.

But the big surprise is that apparently this was a "reload" cartridge. There was no latent image manufacturer's name on the strip, only (every foot) the letters "S___X" (spaced out a bit - I used the underscores here to symbolize that) plus a six-digit footage number. Perhaps it was a reload with motion picture film (I recall that was pretty common at one time).

I don't recall exactly what the standard full length of a 20-exposure 135 load is, but 20 8-perf frames themselves take up 30". The overall length of this strip (after it lost its leader tongue in the lab) is 65"!

Does anyone recognize the signficance of the "S___X" marking, or have other clues as to what kind of film this might be?

Thanks.
 
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Doug Kerr

Guest
Well, much of the answer is here, from Richard Knoppow on the PhotoKB forum on 2004.02.19, in reply to an inquiry similar to mine:

These look like they were packaged for special purpose
use since they say Eastman rather than Kodak on them. I
wonder if they were even packaged by Kodak, they may be bulk
loaded cassettes with lables showing the kind of film in
them. SX with some thought is probably Super-X. This was a
motion picture stock. The brand "Super-X" was used for 16mm
reversal film but was a 35mm negative stock before that, c.
mid 1930's. Eventually it was replaced by Plus-X and the
name Super-X used for the reversal film. SS is Super
Sensitive Pan, also a motion picture stock of the mid to
late 1930's. Panatomic was also used for a motion picture
stock replacing the former Background and Background-X
stocks, both very slow, very fine grain (for the time)
motion picture negative films for outdoor use. Background
implyed the film was intended for filming background
"plates" i.e., the films used in rear projection shots.

What I think is that these are bulk loaded from "short
ends" of these films. That might have been done pre-ww-2 but
tons of film were available military surplus right after the
war and were sold both in bulk and spooled.

Its too bad the film is gone because the type of
perforations would tell the story. 35mm motion picture
negative stock uses Bell & Howell perforations, which have
semicircular sides. 35mm positive films and still camera
films have Kodak Standard perfs which are oblong with
rounded corners. Some very early film for 35mm still cameras
had the negative perforations but films from at least the
mid 1930's, perhaps even earlier, had KS perfs.


In fact, my mystery film does have BH perfs (I neglected to mention that).

As a matter of possible interest, the BH ("Bell & Howell") type perforations (originally developed by B&H as a motion picture camera manufacturer) were used in commercial motion picture cameras to assure the most precise alignment of the negative stock. The camera sprocket teeth were actually a bt larger than the perforations, and entered with a slight "force fit" (they only had to go in and out once, so the "wear" this caused was not destructive).

The optical printer sprockets had teeth carefully sized to make an essentially zero-clearance entrance into the deflowered BH perforations on the exposed and developed negatives.

The release prints had the KS (Kodak Standard) perforations, just as are used on 35-mm still film. These were designed to be entered many times by projector sprocket teeth.

Best regards,

Doug
 
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