I've had a number of rolls of Metropolis come through my lab and was intrigued because even though it's C-41, it doesn't really look or behave much like C-41 film, so I thought I'd burn a roll and see what it was about.
First off, it's not the same contrast as standard C-41. It's way more contrast. I doubt you could print it onto RA-4 paper. I measured the contrast by making a series of exposures of a gray exposure card metered at ISO 200, then subtracted two stops from that for my LD, then added 5 stops to that to form the HD. The (HD-LD)/1.5 for each color channel comes out to 0.49, 0.54, and 0.59 for RGB as seen by my digitizer setup (not intending to get into that, this is just a reference relative to standard C-41). By comparison, standard C-41 control strip (HD-LD)/1.5 comes out to 0.39, 0.48, 0.59 on the same setup. This undoubtedly makes for a difficult to print image if trying to print onto RA-4 paper.
The white balance multipliers to get a neutral white relative to film base plus fog are also quite a bit different than standard C-41: R1.243815 G1.000000 B1.138936. Standard C-41 comes out to: R1.172276 G1.000000 B1.368644
Assuming you could correct the contrast and get to a neutral grey in 5500K light on an RA-4 print, there's also the color palette to consider:
It's not exactly terrible, but not what I'd call the most awesome color palette ever. Given that it's C-41 and lately C-41 in general has been hard to come by, this could be a good diversion. Also, LOMO states that it's a 100-400 speed film. Nope. I metered it at 200 and the normally exposed grey exposure card came out exactly where I'd expect it to relative to the film base plus fog for a 200 speed film. You can expose it 100-400, but it's best at 200.
Anybody else shot this? Thoughts? I've got a couple more rolls. Once the weather clears up a bit and I can go outside without getting dumped on with buckets of water, I'll shoot some outdoors stuff, and maybe do some studio portrait stuff with flash to see what that looks like and update this post with that.
First off, it's not the same contrast as standard C-41. It's way more contrast. I doubt you could print it onto RA-4 paper. I measured the contrast by making a series of exposures of a gray exposure card metered at ISO 200, then subtracted two stops from that for my LD, then added 5 stops to that to form the HD. The (HD-LD)/1.5 for each color channel comes out to 0.49, 0.54, and 0.59 for RGB as seen by my digitizer setup (not intending to get into that, this is just a reference relative to standard C-41). By comparison, standard C-41 control strip (HD-LD)/1.5 comes out to 0.39, 0.48, 0.59 on the same setup. This undoubtedly makes for a difficult to print image if trying to print onto RA-4 paper.
The white balance multipliers to get a neutral white relative to film base plus fog are also quite a bit different than standard C-41: R1.243815 G1.000000 B1.138936. Standard C-41 comes out to: R1.172276 G1.000000 B1.368644
Assuming you could correct the contrast and get to a neutral grey in 5500K light on an RA-4 print, there's also the color palette to consider:
It's not exactly terrible, but not what I'd call the most awesome color palette ever. Given that it's C-41 and lately C-41 in general has been hard to come by, this could be a good diversion. Also, LOMO states that it's a 100-400 speed film. Nope. I metered it at 200 and the normally exposed grey exposure card came out exactly where I'd expect it to relative to the film base plus fog for a 200 speed film. You can expose it 100-400, but it's best at 200.
Anybody else shot this? Thoughts? I've got a couple more rolls. Once the weather clears up a bit and I can go outside without getting dumped on with buckets of water, I'll shoot some outdoors stuff, and maybe do some studio portrait stuff with flash to see what that looks like and update this post with that.