Whats your favorite 'consumer' film?

[cherryrig]

Portra or Superia

Just shooting a roll of Reala at the moment so will be nice to see how that comes out, but mainly have shot Portra

 

[spotulate]

You can get Portra at WalMart!!??

IIRC Kodak BW400 (c41 black and white) film was part of the Portra line before it was made a consumer film.

 

[2F/2F]

Superia Reala is also available in 120 but only in 100 ISO, I use a lot of it in my Mamiyas and find it excellent for general photography in reasonable lighting conditions.

Reala is my favorite color neg emulsion, for situations when I need a medium-speed film. I am so glad it is being imported again!

Too bad Superia is only available in the 100 emulsion. Some medium format Press 1600 would be a killer tool!

I don't understand why we need so many varieties of daylight-balanced 100-160 films. It is really screwy. How can the market demand a dozen different 100-160 films, but not a single fast tungsten film?

 

[glockman99]

Kodak Gold 200...I've been using that stuff since it first came out...Great balance of good color and smallish grain.

 

[keithwms]

Reala.

 

[Excalibur2]

Kodak Gold 200...I've been using that stuff since it first came out...Great balance of good color and smallish grain.

Well I've just bought a cheap neg scanner about a month ago so have had some experience by now, and put a strip of negs in yesterday (from shots taken 2 years ago in sunny conditions) and had problems with colours and grain, WTF! check the neg and it was Kodak 200asa (film edge 200-7) the prints were VG and scanned them instead.
Well while I've had colour problems now and again scanning fuji superia 200 negs, I've never seen grain from a low asa properly exposed colour neg before.
Maybe a warning to scanners, that you might get grain from Kodak 200?

 

[srs5694]

Colors in scans can be a problem because of software issues. You may be able to tweak settings or switch software to improve matters. I've got a procedure I follow with my software (VueScan) that works for me.

Grain may be exaggerated in scans because of grain aliasing. This is a somewhat controversial topic, but the basic idea is that the random pattern of grain (or, technically, dye clouds in color film) interacts with the highly regular pixel pattern of a scanner to exaggerate the appearance of grain in scans. With my Minolta DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 at 2700 dpi, I usually see this in color films of ISO 400 and faster. The effect can be reduced by scanning at higher resolutions. There are also post-scanning grain-reduction algorithms, but in my experience they tend to create slightly blurry images.

 

[Excalibur2]

Colors in scans can be a problem because of software issues. You may be able to tweak settings or switch software to improve matters. I've got a procedure I follow with my software (VueScan) that works for me.

Grain may be exaggerated in scans because of grain aliasing. This is a somewhat controversial topic, but the basic idea is that the random pattern of grain (or, technically, dye clouds in color film) interacts with the highly regular pixel pattern of a scanner to exaggerate the appearance of grain in scans. With my Minolta DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 at 2700 dpi, I usually see this in color films of ISO 400 and faster. The effect can be reduced by scanning at higher resolutions. There are also post-scanning grain-reduction algorithms, but in my experience they tend to create slightly blurry images.

I've come across this in B/W negs and it might have been you that answered me. erm now colour, maybe a one off from Kodak..but if I see a pattern will post....no problem with fuji 200 and 1600 asa so far.

 

[Excalibur2]

Well in further tests have found Kodak 200 asa, film edge 200-7 is poor for scanning (but only two films tested so far)..I'm getting better results (sharper and clearer) from the same scanned 4X6" print at 600dpi, even though I scanned the neg at 1200dpi.
It's not the scanner (epson 2480) as this is fuji 200asa, scanned at 1200dpi, taken with a canon 28mm:-

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31831722@N08/3367821640/sizes/l/

Maybe it's some dodgy Kodak film, or someone can prove otherwise?