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Ektar 100 - Truly the finest grained color negative film?

real_liiva

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Kodak markets Ektar 100 as the finest grained color negative film in the world, but is that really true even when taking into account films not made for "mere mortals"? Like not even talking about technical films like duplication/print films or other analog movie workflow technical films but rather films like Vision3 50D and Aerocolor that are meant to be used in camera and both capable of producing extremely fine grained results. Haven't shut much any Ektar so don't have much of a direct comparison and anyway my Plustek has trouble resolving the grain of them anyway, it's just too fine.
 
Aerocolor isn't all that small-grained. It doesn't compete with Ektar 100 in that sense. Vision3 50D is probably similar; I don't recall having seen much difference between that and Ektar in terms of grain - both films just have very little apparent grain to them. In pretty much all other ways, they're quite different, though.
 
I believe their Marketing department was thinking in terms of color negative photographic films. TBH people misuse other films for photography for unusual reasons: to have fun experimenting and cross-processing, or to save money by enduring the pitfalls of ECN-2. And speaking of the pictorial films, the one I am curious about as a potential competitor for Ektar 100 in terms of grain would be the Fujicolor 100. There's also "Fujicolor Industrial 100" which I'm not sure whether that's the same film. I haven't used either. Has anyone?
 
Steven Lee said:
And speaking of the pictorial films, the one I am curious about as a potential competitor for Ektar 100 in terms of grain would be the Fujicolor 100.
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Not really close at all - most amateur CN films are 1-2 stops worse in apparent granularity (RMS Granularity is essentially ineffective when dealing with CN films - it's about perceived granularity - and how to scientise that) than professional - if a slower Pro160S in a revised form had come to exist, then there might have been an interesting possible comparison - effectively Ektar 100 seems (in part) to have been intended to give close to the same perceived granularity as Ektar 25/ Royal Gold 25 of the early-mid 1990s - i.e. a 2-stop speed/ grain improvement. Scanning throws a certain amount of chaos into this - especially if the scans aren't delivering really good low frequency sharpness, and/ or are running at too high a resolution with far too much sharpening going on - if you can avoid letting those spanners land in the works, then Ektar delivers. Just respect that its +1 overexposure latitude is a very much harder line (than Portra or almost all Fuji CN films)for getting colours to more-or-less behave coherently with each other, not for density.
 
It depends what you mean by color film. Some interneg films in the ISO range of 1.5 are clearly sharper than Ektar.
 
My Dad's Kodachrome ASA 10 slides crazy, no grain 65 years old. Ektar is wonderful.
 
The appearance of sharpness is also related to contrast, so Ektar has an edge there. But I have every reason to believe that Ektar is in fact the finest grain CN film out there, at least for a general purpose film. I've worked with a number of duplicating films. The very finest of them was about par with Ektar.
 
Samu said:
It depends what you mean by color film. Some interneg films in the ISO range of 1.5 are clearly sharper than Ektar.
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Probably not. This is an area where there had/ has to be careful choices about MTF sharpness in intermediate films so as not to excessively boost the sharpness of the camera neg in immediately obvious and visually unpleasant ways in the final print. This is discussed as a key material design consideration in the industry texts.
 
Lachlan Young said:
effectively Ektar 100 seems (in part) to have been intended to give close to the same perceived granularity as Ektar 25/ Royal Gold 25 of the early-mid 1990s - i.e. a 2-stop speed/ grain improvement.
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I wish Royal Gold 25 was still available. I have not been able to make Ektar 100 work as well for me, but that certainly may be my fault re. exposure or technique. The last good roll of 25 that I used was in 2021. On another thread, they discussed that it did not age well. That has been my experience, too.


 
I'm mostly familiar with Ektar in 120 but I have used some 35mm Ektar last summer and I was again amazed by what it can do in terms of tonal rendition. With the right light, the images I've taken with it remind me of the colours my uncle would get in the Kodachrome 64 slides he used to project for us in the 90s or so.

I personally don't care that much about its perceived or advertised fine grain properties. It's fine grained enough for my purposes. I've never once looked at an Ektar print or scan and thought to myself 'Pity. Almost there. I only wish it was even finer-grained than this'. I think we are lucky to have Kodak still making such a peerless product.
 
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It's pity that Kodak cancelled the whole Ektar line (except 100). I've seen ads about the Ektar 25 and it was stunning. There were Ektar 1000 as super high speed neg. Sadly they were all gone and hard to find.

 
hoomuzzz said:
the whole Ektar line (except 100)
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The question, however, is how closely related all those different Ektar films really were. As far as I understand, they were all pretty much unique products, even though they shared some underlying technology obviously. But any two Ektars were probably as dissimilar as Portra 160 compared to Gold 400 etc.

I also think you'll get objectively much better performance from Portra 800 today than you would have gotten from Ektar 1000 back all those years ago.

Ektar 25 was a bit of an oddball film as I understand; it never saw much use/popularity (probably just too slow for that) and it was discontinued quickly. There are some nice anecdotes about it on photo.net; look for posts by Joe Manthey on the subject.
 

Last year I came across some Ektar 25 and 1000, which expired in 1990. Although sealed and stored at low temperatures, the image could not bear the sight: the base darkened and was bluish. It's too old to work on its original performance. It's hard to find another one in good condition.

 
IIRC paraphrasing PE, Ektar has more commonality with Motion Picture Vision 3 than Portra 400 does. In the way that the latter incorporated improvements from V3 but was not that close when it comes to development. Interesting now that the last wave of large film improvements were launched 2007-10, so Portra and Ektar + Vision 3 films have been at market longer than some of these revered late films like Ektar 25. When it comes down to granularity, also Tmax is about the best for B&W. There, paraphrasing PE again, Kodak released TMY400-2 in 2007 but decided to leave TMX as is, the ISO 100 product was as good as it could be.
The RMS granularity is different between C41 adn E6, but in there reversal films are fantastically fine grained.

Ektar is a really great film, though a bit too saturated and contrasty for some subjects and I mostly ended up preferring the subtleness of Portra. And ironically, in this time and age, absolute fine granularity might not be what a sizeable amount of users might want anymore.
 
Prest_400 said:
IIRC paraphrasing PE, Ektar has more commonality with Motion Picture Vision 3 than Portra 400 does.
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Such comparisons are always very tricky to make - and I accept readily that this is also true for my earlier comments.
There certainly is a lot of technology being shared between these products - and Gold, TMAX etc. Technologies related to dye sensitization, emulsification, sensitization etc. will be applied in very similar ways but with different process parameters across a broad range of films.

To clarify, my earlier comment intended to say that there has probably never been a single, distinct "Ektar" look.
 
xkaes said:
My stash has been frozen since birth and still works like new.
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Ektar 25 utilized a component that was not shared with the other Ektars. Shortly after introduction a problem related to freezing was identified as caused by that component, and it was replaced with another component that didn't exhibit the problem. In other words, very early production had a freezing problem (that is probably the "keeping problem" that is often repeated due to a comment from Ron Mowrey), but the issue was fixed as rapidly as possible during production. So some early examples will exhibit the freezing problem, but most will not.
 
Present Ektar 100 is way better color balanced than its predecessor, Efke 25, and obviously a lot faster too, at equally fine grain. I routinely freeze it, and even have a sizable stash of 8x10 Ektar 100 in the freezer, fortuitously purchased at about a fourth the price it goes for now.

Yes, its an elevated contrast and more hue saturated film than traditional color neg films. And it's not artificially warmed like Gold or the Portra series, intended for portraiture. Ektar fills a different niche, with more in common visually with chrome slide films than traditional color neg films.
 
Let's not forget about Impesa 50 -- no problem with freezing.

 

pitfalls of ECN-2??? What pitfalls?
 
xkaes said:
Let's not forget about Impesa 50 -- no problem with freezing.

View attachment 363154
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I have used Impressa before and have a few rolls of this in 120 in my freezer. That said, it was problem prone to getting off colors with this film, even when scanning. It was hard to get colors right. Because of that, I stopped shooting more of it. I may try it again some day, but I wont ever use it for important pictures.
 
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