I just had to try it out, one day. So I did the ‘smart’ thing and got myself a 400ft roll of Eastman Double-X (a.k.a. 5222) to play with. Here’s a brief report of my first attempt with this film.
For those of you who have missed it: Eastman Double X is a product oriented at the cine market (so moving images) and one of the notable productions shot on a slightly modified (bigger = better) version of it was Oppenheimer. In 35mm format, the film code is ‘5222’, so it’s often sold under that name when it’s respooled into little 35mm cassettes used by amateur photographers like you and me.
Being an irrational tinkerer, I skipped the sensible option of just buying a couple of cassettes from whomever respools this stuff and went out to buy 400ft of it. This gets you one of the fancy Kodak film cans, bringing a tiny bit of bygone era Hollywood in your home.

I understand there are bulk roll loaders that can take 400ft wheels of film, but I don’t have one of those, so I can’t comment. I bet they must be convenient, of sorts. Instead, I chose to 3D print a gizmo myself so I can split a 400ft wheel into four 100ft rolls, which then fit ordinary bulk loaders.


I couldn’t wait until I had a 100ft bulk loader free, so I loaded up some cassettes with an arbitrary length of film in the dark so I could sample the product. I did my first test using two short rolls of film, which I processed differently. I exposed both rolls at EI250 in my Canon T90, using its unsurpassed multi-spot metering mode to place exposure just where I wanted it (to the best of my ability).
The first roll I developed in home-made Kodak D96 as per the 5222 datasheet. I A gamma of 0.66 sounded OK and the datasheet gives a time of 6m30s at 21C for this contrast. I admit I’ve never worked with D96 before, so I have no specific opinion on it. I got an image alright.
The second roll I exposed right after the first, on a dreary January afternoon in somewhat fading light (so no technically strict comparison!) This roll I developed in Pyrocat HD 1+1+100 for 18 minutes, with an agitation cycle every 3 minutes. I deduced the 18 minute development time by using the known/published D96 time for this film and a benchmark film for which I could find comparable times with comparable developers. 18 minutes didn’t sound outlandish to me – although in hindsight, it really was.
The negatives I obtained from both rolls look very successful, provided I’m looking for something that will stop anti-tank munitions. In other words – maybe a bit on the contrasty side.

Oh, they scanned just fine on the flatbed, so it’s not all that dramatic. Here’s a digital contact sheet showing both rolls:

Interestingly, the contrast of both test rolls seems to be fairly closely matched. So my attempt at finding a comparable development time for my Pyrocat HD development regime seems successful enough. It’s just that the benchmark time in D96 seems a little too crass to me. Or maybe my home-made D96 was a little overactive? It’s entirely possible; I don’t think I made a mixing error, but it’s possible the pH was off target for whatever reason (I can’t really think of any, though).
Anyway, it doesn’t matter for me; I generally just go with what I get and adjust my process ont he results I see. As long as I end up where I want to be, I don’t worry too much about the technicalities. In this case, I think next time I’m going to stick with the Pyrocat regime, but cut development time back to 12 minutes (keeping the 3 minute agitation cycle). E.I. 250 seems OK and I think I might actually be able to get away with 400 in flat light. Let’s see how it goes, but that’s for another day.
Of course, you don’t really know what you got until you print it, so I made a few quick & dirty enlargements onto Fomaspeed RC paper. The prints are relatively small, at around 13x19cm image size, which is explained by the use of half a sheet of 24×30.5cm for each image with a 1cm margin top and bottom, and a little more to the sides.
The hard negatives necessitated prints at around grade 0 to 1 – so yes, definitely a good reason to cut back development quite dramatically. Still, at these low grades, the prints came out quite OK. Still a lot of punch, but I like that. In the prints, I opted to sacrifice shadows here and there to the benefit of highlights. Don’t be fooled – shadow detail in the negatives is very decent by all means, so I have no doubt whatsoever that this film lives up to its box speed. Hey, it’s Kodak. These people don’t tell fairytales.
I’ve attempted to digitally recreate the prints as they look in real life on the basis of flatbed scans from the actual prints. This is always quasi-successful at best, and the real prints look a little more snappy (still) than the digital versions. Hey, trying to judge a print from a monitor is inherently hopeless, so this can only give a bit of an impression at best, anyway.
Here are the prints from the D96-processed frames:





These were all printed at grade 1, but that was a bit too high a grade. To compensate for this, I burned the highlights on all of them by about half a stop, give or take a little.
Now for the Pyrocat-developed images:





These were printed at grade 0, with the second to last print as an exception, which I printed at grade 1 because the scene was a little more subdued. I decided at around the first Pyrocat print that grade 1 really was a bit too much for most images, but as said before, the contrast in the actual negatives is very comparable. The Pyrocat prints look a little more subdued, but this is really mostly due to the grade choice in printing. I didn’t apply much burning on these images; I burned the white water in the waterfall image a little, but the rest was pretty much straight.
What to make of this? Not much more than meets the eye. The film produces images alright and they print more or less fine. This was intended mostly to establish a baseline for my practical use as a snapshot film, and as such, the ‘test’ was successful. I know that I’ll need to cut back development a little for the next roll.
Looking at the images closely (which of course is my prerogative, having actual access to them), I have a subtle preference for the Pyrocat-processed film. But I say this in the full awareness that I’m probably fooling myself on the basis of gut feeling, unsubstantiated observations that don’t have a basis in verifiable facts, combined with a healthy dose of confirmation bias. At this print size, the difference is so slight that on the basis of the prints, I have no way of telling which print tracks back to which film developer. I only know because I have the negatives by which I can verify which is which.
One thing you might wonder about is grain. This is one area where you might expect a notable difference between the D96- and the Pyrocat-developed film. The problem is that assessing grain is a tricky topic, and how grain renders, depends a lot on how you measure/observe it. Enlarging grain with a condenser enlarger will yield different results from a diffuser enlarger, which will be different from looking at it with a microscope, and that’s again different from scanning it with a flatbed scanner, which is yet different from a dedicated film scanner. Then there’s the issue that the appearance of grain tends to different quite significantly depending on the average image density of the area you’re looking at.
To make a quick & dirty attempt at comparing things, let’s stick with a single scanner (my trusty old Minolta Scan Dual IV), stick it at its native 3200dpi resolution and scan two negatives with comparable image densities. Here’s what we get at 100% magnification:


The D96-developed film is at the top, the Pyrocat-developed film at the bottom. Both images were scanned as positive/slide B&W and then inverted with the exact same adjustment curve in GIMP.
What I can see from this is precisely the opposite from what I think I see in the actual prints. To me, the prints seemed to show a slightly more ‘snappy’ and ‘crisp’ grain on the D96-processed images. In this particular sample, I see the exact opposite, with the Pyrocat-processed negative showing distinctly more snappy/crisp grain while the D96-processed film looks a little fuzzy by comparison. What to make of it? I wouldn’t dare to go much further than what I said before – these comparisons are tricky.
Maybe the scanner failed to focus properly on the D96 frame. Maybe there’s a minor waviness in the film, causing a focus issue. Or maybe the grain on the Pyrocat image really is a little tighter – after all, D96 contains a truckload of sulfite, and maybe that ends up doing more than the ‘grain masking’ behavior of the pyro stain.
If I look at how fine, high-contrast details render (e.g. the tiny little branches of far-away trees against a bright sky), I think I see some difference in favor of the Pyrocat frames. But really, this may be due again mostly to other factors, such as technique (minor focus errors or motion blur) or lens differences (a 24/2.8 FD is really quite different from a 50/1.8 FD). Based on the material I have, I wouldn’t dare to go as far as draw any conclusions regarding developer.
When all is said and done, I still prefer the Pyrocat negatives. Why? See above; for no really solid reason. Objectively, the differences are too small to stand out clearly in this informal experiment. At the very least, the Pyrocat negatives aren’t any worse than the D96-processed ones. That’s good enough for me, at this point.
Back to the film for some closing comments. Looking at the scanned contact sheet and how the film responds to development, it reminds me a little of Fomapan 200, in the sense that it very readily builds contrast. It’s easy to get rather dense highlights if the film is over-exposed and/or over-developed, and this means that both exposure and development are a bit more critical than on something like HP5+. I’ve seen some discussion online on how to best handle 5222 with particular attention to the ‘best’ way to process it. With this initial experience, I can sort of see why people discuss this and maybe even struggle with it. It’s perhaps a little more tricky to get consistently good results from this than with the regular still-photography oriented films from the two major manufacturers.
Having said all that – Double-X strikes me as a pretty normal, perfectly usable, no-fuss, no-thrills B&W film. It’s not particularly grain-free for its speed, but also not excessively grainy considering that it’s not a modern T-grain type film like Kodak TMAX. It doesn’t seem to be significantly slower than its box speed. And the stories about halation problems I’ve read also haven’t shown up clearly in this initial test, even though I included quite a number of frames that are sensitive to this, with dark trees against bright skies. Indeed, the film after processing is slightly magenta and the used Pyrocat developer was very brightly colored as well, suggesting that similar anti-halation dyes are present as in other still films.
I may revisit some of the observations above as I gain more experience using this film. At this point, I’m looking forward to being able to put it to good use with no particular concerns apart from trying not to nuke it to oblivion by overdeveloping it.
Hele uitgebreide review. Dankjewel! Vind ik heel handig om meer over te weten. Heb je het ook direct van Kodak gekocht?
Thanks! No, no direct purchase from Kodak. I used frame24.co.uk. You may be able to find a source on mainland Europe as well. So far my experiences with Frame24 have always been excellent, so I’ve remained with them.