Lucky C200 vs Phoenix II

Despite being talked about a lot, there has not been much review about Lucky's new color negative C200 in the western part of the world since its lauch in July in China. I recently got my hands on this film and did a quick test comparing it with Phoenix II, which launched just one day earlier. Current price of Lucky is ￥59 (around US$8.2) inclusive of development/scan and 6inch print out.



Here are the side by side test shots. Camera is Contax G1+G45. I shot both films at EI 100. I developed myself in standard C41, and scanned with my R6, NLP converted using default settings.

Lucky


Phoenix II


Lucky


Phoenix II


Lucky


Phoenix II


Lucky


Phoenix II



Conclusion:

To my eyes, Lucky C200 is better by a margin. Phoenix II is a lot grainier, has less latitude, and highlight halation is bad.
Lucky has quite fine grain structure, color is a bit muted, but nostalgic. It does suffer from quality issues, including lots of blue/grey dots and banding, which is due to hand coating in the first batch. This is supposed to be corrected in the future runs.
If Lucky manages to get rid of these defects, and bring down the price to under ￥50 (US$7), I guess we would have a winner here.
Next I will compare it to Colorplus.

Btw, I encountered some banding issues with the Phoenix II. Has anyone else had this problem?

Thanks for showing us your Lucky 200 shots and Phoenix II shots with some reds in them. I don't know whether the latter is even more rare than the former...

The banding in Phoenix II is definitely not a coating problem. I'd definitely check you camera and processing.

Also wondering if scanning could be improved, Lucky particularly shows some really unattractive magenta casts...

Skycreeper said:

I encountered some banding issues with the Phoenix II.

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This looks like incomplete fixing. Check your processing.

I'm sorry to be 'that guy', but given the problems with the scans, I'd be hard pressed to conclude anything on how these films compare. The only thing we can say anything about would be the halation. The rest is influenced so strongly by factors that do not relate directly to the film used that it's just not sensible to draw any conclusions from.

koraks said:

This looks like incomplete fixing. Check your processing.

I'm sorry to be 'that guy', but given the problems with the scans, I'd be hard pressed to conclude anything on how these films compare. The only thing we can say anything about would be the halation. The rest is influenced so strongly by factors that do not relate directly to the film used that it's just not sensible to draw any conclusions from.

Click to expand...

Well except to say that purely based on the comparison scans in each case the Lucky colours seem more natural and the grain less coarse

Is this due to the way the scanning was done - I have no idea. If these were 2 sets of prints in my hands then I'd have to say that the Lucky prints win hands down

Just what my eyes tell me of course

pentaxuser

pentaxuser said:

If these were 2 sets of prints in my hands

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But they're not.

Mind you - there's no doubt the Lucky product is by far more mature and will generally give more true-to-life results.

koraks said:

But they're not.

Mind you - there's no doubt the Lucky product is by far more mature and will generally give more true-to-life results.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's that plus the apparently lower grain I see in the Lucky scans that wins the day for me

pentaxuser