Film Washi E 120

Overview

"E" did not start life as a camera film. It is an industrial phototooling stock made for imaging printed circuit board masters, which Film Washi buys by the industrial roll and converts to 120 at its workshop in Brittany. Because PCB imagesetters write onto it with a red laser, the emulsion is red-sensitive with a stated maximum around 700 nm and has no sensitivity to green at all — the mirror image of an orthochromatic film. That inverts the darkroom rule most people work by: the datasheet specifies a GREEN 500 nm safelight, and an ordinary red safelight will fog it. Work under green, or in complete darkness. Film Washi rates it 3 ISO / 6° DIN with very fine grain and strong contrast, machine-coated onto a blue polyester base 175 µm thick — roughly twice the 100 µm base used for its other converted films, so it feels distinctly stiff, and the developed negative sits on a blue transparent base rather than a clear one. No developer, dilution or time is published: the maker's only processing instruction is that it can be processed like a classic RC photo printing paper, meaning paper developer, stop and fix. ISO 3 is enlarging-paper speed, so a tripod is the working assumption — sunny-16 arithmetic puts even a bright sunlit scene at about a quarter of a second at f/16 — and green foliage records very dark, which is why Film Washi points this film at still life and portraits rather than landscape. The 120 rolls are hand-spooled onto recycled backing paper; the datasheet warns that a few very delicate cameras can have trouble winding them, says never to force the winding lever (contact Film Washi instead), and advises securing the exposed roll with a rubber band or tape as soon as it leaves the camera.