Five rolls of film processed in my last Unicolor C-41 kit were pretty much a disaster. I could not find accounts of similar problems experienced by others doing color home processing. It was depressing. I considered going to doing only black and white photography. I like the challenge of black and white, but a life without color for me seemed not worth living.
The sixth roll looked fine; in fact it seemed as good as I've ever gotten from my home color processing efforts. What made the difference was a change of film. The first five rolls were the Fuji 200 that I had used for years. The sixth roll through the C-41 kit was Kodak ColorPlus 200. My conclusion is that the batch of Fuji was defective. Fuji seems to have given up most of its film production and Fuji 200 color has been mostly unavailable for some time. It is possible that some odd lots will show up, but I'm not buying any more.
If Kodak goes the way of Fuji I suppose that I could use digital for color, but I'm hoping I won't have to resort to that.
10 comments:
As you know, ColorPlus has grown to be one of my favorite film stocks. I am slowly shooting up a roll of it in my FE right now.
It depresses me a little to think that we might be burning off the last of (what was probably a vast stockade of) Fujicolor 200.
We seem to be on the same wave-length. My FE is up next as well.
I've liked the results of all the ColorPlus I've used. We'll just have to keep our fingers crossed about quality, price and availability.
I was happy with Fuji 200 for a long time, partly because of the price and local availability. I'm seeing some ads for it at a few places, but I'm mistrustful of it because of my last experience with the film.
Do you have the lot numbers for that C200? It might be helpful to have in case anyone out there is experiencing similar issues. I have some expired ~2016 or so in my freezer right now. It's been ages since I shot any of it.
Sorry to say I do not have the lot number. The explanation of the problem only occurred to me with the last roll of film and by then I had thrown away the boxes. I bought the last half dozen rolls fairly recently, probably from B&H. I wish I had thought to freeze some as you have done.
I like ColorPlus 200 and hope it will remain available. I've also been pleased with my C-41 processing at a lower temp of 95F as it has given me much cleaner negatives.
I like these results Mike. I haven't shot Fujicolor 200 that I can recall. I have some 12ex rolls of Fujicolor 100 in the fridge. It is a rather unexciting film. ECN2 cross processing brings the grain and pops the reds, giving it a little more interest. Keep up the good work!
I clearly don't have the mind of a chemist or I would have caught the problem earlier with the Fuji 200. I have gotten a little more adventurous lately with expired film, but reliability is still a big issue for me.
Haven't had any issues with C200. Biggest issue I've had was actually with the process itself, since pH has a large role in the quality of the colors. Fuji films have (In my years of testing) been more resilient to pH variants, while Kodak negatives suffer much more. Due to my choice of chemicals requiring mixing 25 liters of developer, I'm pretty much obligated to find a good way of adjusting the pH of the developer without risking further degradation of the chemical, since mixing 25 liters of developer just to use less than a quarter of it is pretty bad. Maybe I'm just a special type of unlucky, but to this day, most of my rolls of home developed C-41 Kodak film have been completely unscannable, and would probably also be unprintable in the darkroom.
I've been pretty happy with both the Unicolor and Cinestill C-41 kits; I think their components are the same. The small price of those kits means that the processing cost per roll is only a buck or two, depending on how far you want to stretch your luck. I have latley been processing at a lower temperature and that has given me quite a bit cleaner negatives than the local color lab produces.
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