Orwochrom UT18 (35mm, 50 iso) User-Review
written by eggzakly
on November 10th, 2009
, 5 comments
(7 votes)
Anyone who knows me, knows I love strange film – the older and stranger the better! And this one is definitely strange: Expired in May 1992, this East German slide film was made to be developed in ORWO process 9165, chemicals which have long since been discontinued.
I found these rolls on eBay (where else?!), the seller let me know that it was possible to develop them in regular c41 or e6 chemicals as long as the temperature was kept at a low 25C. As I didn’t have access to a darkroom at the time, I thought I’d just try to send it to my regular lab to be processed in c41 at normal temperature and see what would happen. And the film came back very strange, and by strange I mean totally, completely, off the wall weird! I unwound the strip at the lab, everybody was looking at it and at first we thought it hadn’t been processed at all – it was almost completely opaque. Then I started noticing that the edges of the frames were visible, albeit very faint, and I thought I’d probably be able to get an image out of it. Of course, everybody else thought I was a complete lunatic for even trying!
The adventure continued at home by my scanner. Getting the scanner to acknowledge that there was indeed film in it, was pretty difficult, but once I found the right spot on the strip to calibrate on I got an image! And what an image… it was strange and trashy, but very, very cool. Probably among the coolest results I’ve had. I promptly went back on eBay and got lots more old ORWO film!
Later on I tried another roll in e6, and even though the first lab I tried refused to develop it, insisting it was black and white film, it turned out disappointingly normal – except for a bit of a blue shift. So the rest of these rolls are definitely going in c41!
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