I am pretty sure there was an ectachrome 400. Also, I think Ectachrome 160 was the tungsten light version that you could have pushed to 400 for a few dollars more during development. We had an e-6 line at the school I went too and as I was good in the dark room I would have to roll about seventy rolls of ectachrome onto dip and dunk reels every Monday morning. Tool about two hours.
quote=OldCADuser]There's another issue when it comes to 'speed' when shooting images.
Back in my film days, it was pretty common for your normal lens to very 'fast', by today's standards. For example, my first SLR was a Minolta SR-1, what you'd call an entry level camera, that I got in 1968. It came with an f1.8 x 55mm lens. A year later I upgraded to a Minolta SRT-101, which came with an f1.4 x 58mm lens. Now there was a reason for these 'fast' lens because we were dealing with what, by today's standards, was slow media, that is film.
Now when dealing with film, we used the term ASA to designate the speed of the film, today we use the term ISO. Note that they are the same. That is an ASA of 100 is same as an ISO rating of 100.
Back in those film days, at least for those of us who almost exclusively shot slides, Kodachrome II was the gold standard, used by most people, and it had an ASA of 25. If you wanted to spend a bit more money you could shoot Kodachrome 64, which, you guessed it, was rated at ASA 64 (note the original Kodachrome, when it was first introduced, was ASA 6).
Note that I didn't use all that much Kodachrome, I referred Ektachrome, as I liked it's cooler colors and besides, I could develop it myself (you had to send Kodachrome to Kodak-licensed labs as the process was proprietary). The standard was Ektachrome-X, which was ASA 64, and I often shot High-Speed Ektachrome, which was ASA 160.
At that time I was only shooting color slides and B&W film. And when it came to B&W we had faster films. I shot either Kodak Pan-X, ASA 125, or Kodak Tri-X, ASA 400 (and it was common to 'push' Tri-X to ASA 1,600 with good results).
Now by today's standards, that was very slow. For example, my mainline camera starts at ISO 100 (and some brands only goes down to ISO 200) but going up to ISO ratings of 2,500-32,000 is not uncommon (my Sony a6500 goes to ISO 51,200). And it's getting better all the time. I know Sony has invested very heavily in their sensors and the CPU chips so as to support these high ISO ratings, giving us amazing low light capabilities (or higher shutter speed shooting). That's why today's standard kit lens generally have a maximum aperture of f3.5 or f4.5. This makes for smaller, lighter and cheaper lens.
Now don't get me wrong, there's still a need for large aperture lens, but not as much for fast shooting but for leveraging depth-of-focus and other visual characteristics, such as bokeh. Which is why my fastest lens is an f2.8 x 60mm macro lens. My two workhorse lens are an f3.5-5.6 x 18-135mm and an f4.0 x 10-18mm. Most of the time I let my camera set the ISO automatically, but I do control it when trying to get certain effects, either shooting at ISO 100 for maximum image quality and clarity, when the subject is not moving or is well lit, to higher ISO settings for when I'm shooting moving subjects (and I want to freeze the motion) and when the light is low.
Anyway, those are my thought about 'fast' lens and how the technology has evolved to where there are other attributes of today's cameras which make the need for 'fast' lens less of an issue.
I am pretty sure there was an ectachrome 400. Also... (
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