When Harman released the original version of Harman Phoenix 200 120 in late 2024, I was one of a handful of photographers who got to test it before release.
I’d shot enough of the 35mm version to have got a sense of what conditions suited it – bright light and strong colours. The enhanced grain and almost cross-processed colour palette lent itself to compact cameras and sunny days. This wasn’t a film for flattering portraits, at least in my experience.
Before its release, the 120 version was carefully described by Harman as another experimental emulsion. The company, better known for its black-and-white films, was still getting to grips with colour film manufacturing. Colour shifts were to be expected.
They weren’t wrong.
The two rolls of Phoenix 200 120 I managed to shoot looked unlike pretty much any other colour film I’d ever used – aside from the expired stuff. On some shots, it looked as if I’d used a graduating filter, with a tobacco-coloured cast colouring a sizeable portion of the frame.
And these were the edited versions. The lab I’d used to develop and scan these said some frames had required quite the effort to get presentable results.
Colour chemistry is a difficult – and expensive – thing to get right, and Harman Technology has done the right thing in couching the film’s capabilities as it improves its production bit by bit. It’s encouraging that, less than a year after the release of Phoenix 200 120, they felt that things had improved enough to justify releasing a new version of the film in 120.
First rolls: Harman Phoenix II (35mm)
In the days ahead of Phoenix II’s launch, I thought I would shoot the new film on the same camera I shot the first version on – the Kiev-60. The Kiev’s Volna-3 standard lens is sharp enough for quality results with some eye-catching bokeh in out-of-focus areas. It’s my go-to medium format shooter for days when I’m feeling fit enough to carry it around. (It weighs close to 2kg.)
Amid the Wimbledon Men’s Singles Finals and an engrossing cricket Test between India and England, I took the Kiev on a walkthrough Greenwich in south-east London. I wanted to see how the film did in evening light, and the Unesco-approved Greenwich has plenty of pleasing sights to capture on film.
I took the first roll around the former Naval College, and the second on a post-pub wander through the town on the way home.
The good news is that the uneven colouring of the original emulsion has largely disappeared. Phoenix II is a film that looks much more like a conventional colour film, even if it’s not quite a conventional colour film.
Compared to the 35mm version which I also shot, the grain is much less prominent; that makes sense given that grain is always going to be harder to reduce on a smaller film format.
Here’s some results from the first film.
Like the 35mm rolls, these shots were lab-scanned, though the 120 films were done by Bayeux in London rather than the Harman Lab. I used Colour Correction in Photoshop Elements to tone down any colour casts, but otherwise kept them reasonably close to what I’d been sent.
In a few shots there’s a definite green bias, such as the pic of the litter bin. It’s fine with a subject like this but might look a little more unnatural with skin tones. That green bias is, however, much less visible in some other shots, such as the one of the yellow food truck and the statue in the grounds of the Naval College. With the auto colour correction, these look pretty natural. The colour palette on the statue shot is a little cooler than you might expect from Kodak Gold 200, but still pretty impressive.
The second roll featured less touristic sights, but plenty of opportunities to gauge the film’s sharpness and colour accuracy.
The sharpness and grain in the picture of the plant box is particularly pleasing, as is the wide-aperture shot of the price board outside of the barbers. The sun is a little lower in the sky so the colour palette feels warmer on these shots, but not unnaturally so.
The pics of the church information board and the bollard on the leafy street show a much more of a greenish tint, and the pre-processed versions definitely had muddier shadows. Both still returned decent enough images after basic editing.
This shot shows, perhaps, just how far Harman have come with Phoenix in the 18-odd months since the first film was released. This looks like it could have been taken on Kodak’s Gold 200 or Lomography’s CN100. The late afternoon sunlight has created a warm Kodak-style tone, but what’s impressive is the sharpness and the lack of blown-out highlights.
Both Phoenix II formats are a definite improvement on the originals, in my opinion, but the 120 version is the one I plan to be shooting more of this summer. As a work-in-progress, Harman’s first colour film is showing great promise.
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.
