Kodak Vision3 200T

Datasheet-derived original. Primary source: Kodak H-1-5213, March 2022. Archived at X-T5/_reference-sources/datasheets/kodak-motion/vision3-200t-5213.pdf, 4 pages, read in full. Settings in the notes; movie mode in the notes.

What the datasheet says

The full exposure-index table, which is unusually complete for any datasheet in this archive:

The finding: this is the only Vision3 stock sold on being finer than its speed

Every other film in the line is positioned by speed and balance, 50D is the fine daylight one, 250D the everyday daylight one, 500T the fast tungsten one. 200T is positioned by a mismatch between its speed and its grain, and Kodak states it in the first sentence: "the image structure of a 100-speed film with the versatility of a 200 speed product."

That is the only claim in the whole line that says this film behaves better than its ISO implies, and it is what makes 200T worth having alongside 250D, the two are within a third of a stop of each other in speed, so without the image-structure claim there would be little reason for both to exist.

How it becomes a setting. The obvious lever is Grain, but the whole line already sits at Weak/Small, the finest tier above Off, so there is nowhere finer to go. The claim therefore lands on Sharpness instead: its speed peers 250D and 500T run −1, and 200T takes a notch back to 0, matching 50D. Finer structure supports more acutance without grain becoming objectionable.

That is an interpretation, and a modest one. The datasheet makes a grain claim and the recipe answers with a sharpness value, because the grain control has no room left. Flagged as such rather than presented as direct derivation.

The line's real limitation, now stated plainly

Four Vision3 films, four genuinely different granularities, and all four recipes are forced onto the same Grain setting, because —/— is the floor above Off. The in-camera control simply has insufficient resolution at the fine end.

For stills this is a hard ceiling on fidelity. For video it is solvable, and that is a genuine argument for shooting these recipes as video rather than stills: movie mode drops Grain entirely, so grain is added in post with continuous control, and post-grain-settings.md derives the scale from the datasheets' own 48 µm measurement aperture. The stills pipeline cannot express the difference between these four films; the video pipeline can.

Where each setting comes from

• Eterna base: house standard for the cinema originals, and the right one: Fujifilm's cinema simulation with low contrast, muted saturation, rich shadows, a documented 12-stop dynamic range "comparable to F-Log" with room for post, and blue tones shifted toward cyan by design.
• — + Highlight —: the direct translation of "up to two stops more image information… from scene highlights." Two stops is precisely what — buys, so this pair is the least arbitrary thing in the recipe.
• WB Incandescent, — & —. Tungsten-balanced like 500T, but neutral where 500T runs —. The reasoning: 500T is used under uncorrected practicals at night and benefits from the correction; 200T's stated home is "controlled interiors" where the lamps are what the film expects. The ± 200 K tolerance is what makes a fixed preset safe here. Practical tungsten drifts, and Kodak built the film to absorb that.
• —. 500T runs +1 for night work. 200T's brief is explicitly dual-purpose, so it stays neutral with the daylight siblings. The family's "reduced grain in shadows" claim is about grain, not tone, and should not be read as licence to deepen the shadow end.
• Color —, CCE —. Eterna suppresses saturation deliberately. Fujifilm's "art of omission", built so no single colour stands out across a sequence. A stills frame has one shot at the viewer, so the line lifts colour modestly and takes richness from Color Chrome Effect (a gradation tool, adding density inside already-saturated colour) rather than from the saturation slider.
• ISO 500–6400. — floors at 500. The ceiling matches 250D, its near speed-peer; 500T keeps 12800 as the dedicated low-light stock.
• EC 0 to +1/3. Two documented stops of highlight headroom on a negative make underexposure the failure mode.

What the digital translation deletes: and what it doesn't

Deleted: the 85-filter penalty. Real 200T shot in daylight needs a Wratten 85 and drops EI 200 → 125, a loss of about 0.68 of a stop. On the X-T5 there is no filter and no speed loss. Switch the WB preset and shoot. The same category of finding as SFX 200, where the digital version removes the filter-factor arithmetic entirely.

Not deleted: the fluorescent problem. Cool-white fluorescent costs 1.6 stops (EI 64) and needs a CC40R on film. Digitally you keep the speed, but you still face a green-spiked source that no white balance fully fixes. Fluorescent and LED sources have gaps in their spectrum, and no amount of channel gain recovers wavelengths that were never emitted. That is the same physical argument as the SFX 200 red-edge finding: you cannot recover information the sensor never received.

Where it sits: the line is now complete

200T is the one that crosses. 50D and 250D are daylight-only; 500T is a night stock. 200T is the stock you load when the day involves both an interior and a street.

Worth noting from the 500T scan work: that recipe's daylight-vs-artificial pair proved the "500T look" is really the stock used out of balance. Neutral under tungsten, teal-orange only in uncorrected daylight. The same logic applies here. Shot under 3200 K, 200T is a neutral, accurate film. The cinematic teal-orange people associate with tungsten stock is what happens when you don't correct it, which is a style choice, not the film's character, and the Daylight variant is the honest way to shoot it outside.

Validation status

Datasheet-validated + Characteristic, no scan. Every setting traces to H-1-5213 or to the Vision3 family behaviour already scan-confirmed on 250D and 500T.

Two honest gaps:

1. No 200T-specific frame. The cinema stocks are structurally hard to evidence. Real footage is not Commons material and frame-grabs of released films carry the DI grade, so they are neither free nor faithful (validation-methodology.md lists this as structurally blocked). The realistic route is a frame from a known 200T production with a documented near-neutral grade, or user-shot footage.
2. No granularity number. The curve is in the archived PDF and has not been digitised, so the "100-speed image structure" claim is quoted, not verified. Digitising it would let the — decision be checked against a real figure rather than an inference.

Derived: 2026-07-25