Panchromatic

Panchromatic means sensitive to all colours of light. Early orthochromatic film had very little sensitivity to red light, leaving red subjects as black in the resulting images. Panchromatic film - originally made by adding dyes to red-insensitive film, a result of work by Dr. Adolf Miethe, is capable of recording red subjects, as its sensitivity range reaches wavelengths of 660-730 nm (orange/red to red). Panchromatic films had decreased sensitivity in the 490-540 nm area (blue to green), but were, however, still too sensitive to blue light (what resulted e.g. in pictures with too bright sky and clouds invisible against white background), therefore required a yellow filter for correct representation of blue color brightness.

A variation of the panchromatic film was the so called superpanchromatic film (also called hochpanchromatisch, i.e. highpanchromatic in German), which had additionally increased sensitivity to red color (in the 620-680 nm range) - as it was intended for use in artificial (tungsten) light of low color temperature. Supermanchromatic film had generally high speed (e.g. 400 ASA).