Harman Technology’s launch of Phoenix 200 35mm colour film in December 2023 was one of the biggest things to happen to film in years.
Since the late 2000s, after the demise of Germany’s Agfa and Italy’s Ferrania, the colour film market has been pretty much left to just two companies – Eastman Kodak in the US and Fujifilm in Japan.
Making colour film is not easy and it is not cheap, which is why new colour films – with the exception of Lomography’s experimental films, Original Wolfen’s NC films and Adox’s Color Mission – have been so hard to come by in the last 15 years.
If I had put betting money on new colour films in 2023, I would have suggested Kodak might have dusted off some old colour film recipes and in introduced something budge-friendly to placate the colour shooters who had suffered so in the Great Covid Colour Film Drought. What I didn’t expect was a colour film from Harman.
Harman is, of course, the name of the company which makes Ilford and Kentmere films. These are fine emulsions, but every one of them is black-and-white film. Colour films used to appear under the Ilford name at various point in the last half of the 20th Century, but these were rebranded films from the likes of Agfa.
To make a colour film from scratch, in 2023, with no real previous experience seemed an almost impossible challenge. But quietly, Harman’s engineers did exactly that.
My first impression of Phoenix, having shot a roll shortly before the release date, was that it looked very similar to some slide films after cross processing – saturated colours, deep blacks and visible grain. There was some visible halation around some highlights, much like you get with some cinema films.
Harman have clearly been working on improving Phoenix 35mm during 2024, but also divulged earlier this summer they would be bringing the film out in 120. According to their marketing department, this was directly due to feedback from customers leaving comments via the QR code hidden the boxes of the 35mm film.
(Read more: Harman Technology releases Harman Phoenix 200 120 film)
Shortly after the softly-softly announcement, a box arrived with half a dozen rolls of the new Phoenix 200 120. I knew I wanted to shoot this film both in my Lomography LC-A 120 and a modified Holga camera I’ve recently been sent to review, but made sure to test the first three rolls in my most-faithful 120 camera, the Kiev-60.
The Kiev-60 was the USSR’s answer to the Pentax 67, a medium format SLR which uses the same lens mount as the East German Pentacon Six. First released in 1984, the Kiev-60 continued being made well after the fall of the USSR, only stopping in 1999. It’s a huge, somewhat unwieldy camera, but easy to use thanks to its SLR styling and the fact it has both an excellent TTL viewfinder and superb lenses.
The standard les that came with the Kiev-60, the Arsenal-made Volna-3 80/2.8, is sharp and has excellent colour rendition. It’s a camera and lens I’ve used for nearly 25 years so it’s always a good benchmark for shooting new films.
The three films you see below were all shot on a sunny London afternoon, in and around Greenwich in south-east London. The films were all developed and scanned by PPP Film Lab in Birmingham by Pierro Pozella, who remarked that the developed films themselves looked very odd, with colour shift across the frames. While this is still noticeable in the scanned shots, PPP has done a great job with the scans.
Here are the results from the first film:
As you can see, the bottom of the roll in some images has a pronounced brown tone that’s darker than the top of the frame – almost like a graduated filter. It’s especially noticeable in the image of the cricket sightscreen wheel, but less pronounced in the image of the “road closed” sign.
The second roll is below:
The tobacco-like brown stain is most striking in the image of the ice cream van – you can see a definite difference in the white of the van’s body at the bottom of the frame compared to about half-way up. It’s perhaps not the effect you’d be looking for from a wedding shoot, but absolutely fine (at least in my eyes) for this kind of shot.
And it’s a perfect example to remind people that, like it’s 35mm relative released a year ago, this is a first iteration of 120 version, and because of that more likely to have imperfections.
Looking at the shot of the pub table, the brown tones are less noticeable – probably because those frames don’t contain any blue sky.
You can also see in the image of the man in front of the shop the halation effect in the highlights.
Here are the images from the third roll:
The shot of the pint of beer looks almost cross-processed, with a definite golden bias (not that that doesn’t suit the subject).
Probably the most dramatic colour shift in the shots from all three rolls is the shot of the two Lime rental bikes by the Thames River. The split between brown and blue is particularly dramatic – I can imagine Lomography would lick their lips at the thought of getting their hands on a film that has this kind of effect.
No doubt this film will change markedly as Harman tweak and improve the emulsion in the coming batches. Colour film chemistry is complex and to have got results this usable so soon after the project is to be commended.
To urge caution with Phoenix 200 120 as it is now is not necessarily to damn it – like Harman themselves have done, context is key. Use this film where you are happy for colour shifts and a slightly unreal colour palette, or be patient. My guess is this extreme look won’t last long.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
God your photos are utterly artless.
Dry your eyes mate. You should be concentrating on that print shop nobody’s visiting.
These look nothing like the photos that I just developed and scanned with the first roll that I shot of PHX 120. I shot several rolls of PHX 35 when it first came out, processing in C-41 and ECN-2 and I very much liked the film overall. Narrow range, orange autumnal cast, but feint, and some halation. My 120 roll came out spectacular. highly saturated, contrasty, truly lovely. (DIY ECN-2, plustek scanned on a portra 160 setting. I cant help but wonder about the lab that did yours. Based on my results it feels like there have been some tweaks to the film.