Film stock is an analog medium that is used for recording motion pictures or animation. It is recorded on by a movie camera, developed, edited, and projected onto a screen using a movie projector. It is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film. The emulsion will gradually darken if left exposed to light, but the process is too slow and incomplete to be of any practical use. Instead, a very short exposure to the image formed by a camera lens is used to produce only a very slight chemical change, proportional to the amount of light absorbed by each crystal. This creates an invisible latent image in the emulsion, which can be chemically developed into a visible photograph. In addition to visible light, all films are sensitive to X-rays and high-energy particles. Most are at least slightly sensitive to invisible ultraviolet (UV) light. Some special-purpose films are sensitive into the infrared (IR) region of the spectrum.
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
The Eastman Kodak Company is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated in New Jersey. It is best known for photographic film products, which it brought to a mass market for the first time.
The following list comprises significant milestones in the development of photography technology.
George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.
135 film, more popularly referred to as 35 mm film or 35 mm, is a format of photographic film used for still photography. It is a film with a film gauge of 35 mm (1.4 in) loaded into a standardized type of magazine – also referred to as a cassette or cartridge – for use in 135 film cameras. The engineering standard for this film is controlled by ISO 1007 titled '135-size film and magazine'.
120 is a film format for still photography introduced by Kodak for their Brownie No. 2 in 1901. It was originally intended for amateur photography but was later superseded in this role by 135 film. 120 film survives to this day as the only medium format film that is readily available to both professionals and amateur enthusiasts.
127 is a roll film format for still photography introduced by Kodak in 1912.
Roll film or rollfilm is any type of spool-wound photographic film protected from white light exposure by a paper backing. The term originated in contrast to sheet film. Confusingly, roll film was originally often referred to as "cartridge" film because of its resemblance to a shotgun cartridge.
Medium format has traditionally referred to a film format in photography and the related cameras and equipment that use film. Nowadays, the term applies to film and digital cameras that record images on media larger than the 24 mm × 36 mm used in 35 mm photography, but smaller than 4 in × 5 in.
The Brownie was a series of camera models made by Eastman Kodak. Released in 1900.
Hannibal Williston Goodwin, patented a method for making transparent, flexible roll film out of nitrocellulose film base, which was used in Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, an early machine for viewing motion pictures.
616 film was originally produced by Kodak in 1932 for the Kodak Six-16 camera.
828 is a film format for still photography. Kodak introduced it in 1935, only a year after 135 film. 828 film was introduced with the Kodak Bantam, a consumer-level camera.
The history of the camera began even before the introduction of photography. Cameras evolved from the camera obscura through many generations of photographic technology – daguerreotypes, calotypes, dry plates, film – to the modern day with digital cameras and camera phones.
Retina was the brand-name of a long-running series of German-built Kodak 35mm cameras, produced from 1934 until 1969. Kodak Retina cameras were manufactured in Stuttgart-Wangen by the Kodak AG Dr. Nagel Werk which Kodak had acquired in December 1931.
In still photography, Kodak's Kodacolor brand has been associated with various color negative films since 1942. Kodak claims that Kodacolor was "the world's first true color negative film". More accurately, it was the first color negative film intended for making paper prints: in 1939, Agfa had introduced a 35 mm Agfacolor negative film for use by the German motion picture industry, in which the negative was used only for making positive projection prints on 35 mm film. There have been several varieties of Kodacolor negative film, including Kodacolor-X, Kodacolor VR and Kodacolor Gold.
Dye transfer is a continuous-tone color photographic printing process. It was used to print Technicolor films, as well as to produce paper colour prints used in advertising, or large transparencies for display.
The Kodak Retina Reflex is a discontinued series of four single-lens reflex cameras made by Kodak in Germany between 1957 and 1974, as part of the Kodak Retina line of 35mm film cameras.
The Kodak Panoram camera was a roll-film swing-lens panoramic camera made in Rochester, New York, USA by Eastman Kodak between 1899 and 1928.
