Chinese film brand Reflx Lab has shared examples of the new Lucky Color 200 colour negative film which was soft launched at a trade fair in China last month.
On its blog, Reflx Lab shared examples taken on a roll of film purchased at the 2025 Shanghai Image & Vision Expo.
The film is China Lucky Film’s first colour film since its range of colour negative films was discontinued back in 2012. The company, which built a film factory with the help of Eastman Kodak in 2003, had been teasing a return to colour film production since the beginning of 2024.
The blog post read: “At the expo, long lines formed as eager photographers waited to purchase the film—only to be told that supplies were extremely limited. Most attendees left empty-handed. That same day, the film went on sale online, but with just over 100 rolls available on the first day, it sold out within seconds.”
According to Reflx Lab, the 36-frame film was sold as a bundle which included shipping, developing, scanning and printing for the equivalent of $8.22 (£6.11), less than the cost of a roll of Kodak’s budget-priced ColorPlus film.
Reflex Lab said: “Lucky stated that the initial production run will be limited to just 10,000 rolls due to the emulsion still being in refinement. They plan to gradually improve the formula and scale up production once all identified issues are resolved.”
The roll was then shot on a Pentax 17 half-frame camera and some of the results published on the blog post. You can see two of the pictures below, but many more are viewable on the Reflx Lab blog post.
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Reflx Lab noted that the film has a more pronounced red bias than Kodak films and doesn’t share Fujifilm’s strong cyans. “However, it’s worth noting that 200 performs best under daylight conditions, which is also indicated on the packaging. Under cloudy skies or indoor lighting, the colours tend to look dull and greyish, so its versatility is somewhat limited,” the blog post read.
It also noted that this first batch of the film suffers from small white and blue dots on the resulting images. This first batch was manually coated and Reflx Lab said the producers had “acknowledged the issue and promised that it will be resolved once they move to machine coating in future batches”.
There is no word on when the next batch of the film will be released, but the new Lucky Color 200 will not be available outside China until the film is in full-scale production.
Lucky Color 200 is not the only 200-ISO colour film to be released this year: Harman Technology released its upgraded Phoenix II film in July, and Original Wolfen’s forthcoming NC 200 film has been released as a rebranded emulsion by Optik Oldschool and KONO!.
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.
