Just five years, the prospect of a slew of new colour negative films seemed unlikely at best.
But the recent arrivals of the likes of Adox Color Mission and Harman Technology’s rapidly improving Phoenix 200 film appear to have opened the gates. Other companies are ensuring Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm don’t have this game entirely to themselves.
The surprise release of the first edition of China Lucky Film’s Lucky Color 200 is one of the biggest things to have happened in film photography this year, and so when I found some of the first rolls available via Chinese film brand and seller Reflx Lab, I found myself instinctively stabbing at the “Buy” button. Three rolls were soon on the way to me.
China Lucky Film launched the new emulsion in July, but it obviously took a few months before the likes of Reflx Lab got hold of them. The three rolls I bought didn’t arrive until early November – a month that’s not exactly peak season for shooting colour film in the UK.
I shot one of the first rolls of Harman Phoenix II I was given in the summer on my Minox 35 AF, and thought it would be good to use this camera again as a control. It is an odd little plastic 35mm camera made by Minox in West Germany from 1988; while it indeed has a four-zone autofocus, the film is advanced and rewound by hand and there’s no integral flash – you have to attach an external proprietary flash.
That and its decidedly plasticky feel make it feel slightly out-of-step compared to its Japanese rivals of the time. Nevertheless, the Minox’s 32mm lens has really nice colour rendition.
With Saturday sunshine fading quickly, I loaded the Minox with one of the Lucky rolls and headed down through Greenwich Park towards Maritime Greenwich, the Unesco-protected riverside neighbourhood that once played host to the British Empire’s most celebrated explorers. The historic park, Greenwich’s grand Georgian buildings and the river itself always provide plenty of picture opportunities. I was able to shoot the entire roll before the sunshine disappeared.
The pictures here look decidedly like they could have been taken on expired Agfa Vista film, though that will partly be down to the red/gold quality of the failing light. It’s worth noting too that asking your lab to colour correct the scans – or to do it yourself if you scan them at home – could mitigate this a little. I often shoot expired film anyway – especially to test cameras I sell through Cameraburo – so the effect isn’t unpleasant, at least to me.
The most noticeable effects came from a shot I took indoors on my cat before going out. Here the bright light is confined to a patch of sunlight coming though the window, and the purple fringing is particularly noticeable around the window. This is obviously a picture that would need some colour correction before you printed it, and is the best image I could find to show Lucky Color 200 is still very much a film in progress.
And while the colour palette looks a little skewed, there’s no lack of contrast and the grain looks normal. You obviously can’t always say that about expired film.
Out of the three rolls I shot for this first test, this is definitely the roll that feels most like a film that’s work-in-progress (like the first batch of Harman Phoenix) but the next roll on the FED-3 shows what things look like in proper sunshine…
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.
