It’s somewhat recently come to my attention, and I feel that I’m hardly alone in this observation, that film and its processing keep steadily ticking up in price. When I first dove back into this grainy world about 10 years ago, Kodak Portra 400 was running about $14/35mm roll, Fuji Pro 400h (RIP, my dearly beloved…) around $15/35mm roll, and Kodak Ektar 100 sat at about $10/roll. My go-to Portra 400 now comes in at $19/roll while Ektar 100 is at a staggering $17/roll.
Processing costs have also gone up (my usual lab now charges $19/C-41 35mm roll) and I altogether refuse to have my BW film developed anywhere other than at home ($22/roll for BW at the lab, but I can do it for FAR cheaper with relative ease). Even pushing film has jumped considerably, which is an aesthetic that I like and used to often employ, from $1/stop to $3/stop. I’ve attempted developing C-41 myself and barely escaped with my life, so that option is out.
If I were to shoot a roll of $19 Portra 400, get it developed and pushed for $22, and then also deal with shipping costs to and from Alaska, I’m looking at about $50/roll! So what’s a girl to do? Hightail it to our local camera store and pick up a number of consumer stocks that clock in between $10-$12/35mm roll, of course. Shout out to Stewart’s Photo in downtown Anchorage for carrying an impressive supply of film stocks! I started with Kodak Gold 200, Kodak Ultramax 400, and Kodak ProImage 100.
These rolls were shot with either my Nikon F100 or Olympus XA, rated at box speed (except for the expired Agfa 400, which I rated at 100 to compensate for the approximate 2 decades of expiration). However, the Gold and one of the Ultramax rolls were developed at a new local lab and the rest were sent off to my usual, The FIND Lab. I always choose to have FIND scan my negatives with the Frontier scanner, but I don’t know which scanner the local lab uses. It could be a Noritsu. I found the local lab scans to be very contrasty and with a fairly strong blue channel that I was fighting in post for the Kodak Gold 200 roll, ironically. Anyways, I made a note of what each stock was shot on and where it was developed to make it easier to compare and draw conclusions:
Kodak Gold 200 on Nikon F100, local lab on unknown scanner
Any yellows or oranges turned out REALLY warm.
Kind of skews into magenta shadows.
Indoor mixed lighting will always be weird, but this went really blue/green.
Kodak Ultramax 400 on Nikon F100, local lab on unknown scanner
The skin tones were almost garish on the UltraMax from the local lab, but I liked them from the FIND. See below.
It did handle overcast conditions pretty well.
Expired Kodak UltraMax 400 on Nikon F100, FIND Lab on Frontier scanner
Skin tones were a lot more natural on the Frontier scanner.
Kodak ProImage 100 on Olympus XA, FIND Lab on Frontier
It really liked the diffused light on this jazz jam session.
Handled indoor shots fairly well for a 100 ISO, but obviously still shifted yellow.
Bonus: Expired Agfa 400 on Olympus XA, FIND Lab on Frontier
So there we have it thus far. I think I lean towards preferring the UltraMax over Gold, which was a bit of a surprise, but I need to send a roll of Gold to The FIND Lab to confirm my suspicions. I also just loaded up some consumer Fujifilm 400 that I’m curious to see as well, although rumor has it that it’s just UltraMax. I’ll do a part 2 eventually with a couple more rolls for comparison. Or…maybe I’ll just switch to shooting only BW for the rest of my life to keep costs down :-p