Positive negative
Kodak's medium format Ektar 100 colour negative film rolls are a welcome addition to its range, says Jonathan Eastland
After a break of nearly two decades, Kodak re-launched a new Ektar colour negative emulsion for 35mm users last year. As I noted in my review (BJP, 26 November 08), it produced colours closer to the more established Kodak Portra film family.
This colour engineering has a characteristic fingerprint, less pronounced in the Ektar 100 than in the Portra range, but evident nonetheless. In film exposed under diffused but bright daylight conditions, whites contained small amounts of cyan cast while many darker shades of green vegetation looked decidedly blue. While this did not appear to affect the saturation or cleanliness of reds or yellows, the overall effect produced a slightly unsettling motif rendition.
Where Kodak suggests using Portra for the rendition of natural skin tones, Ektar has a wider gamut suitable for tackling a range of outdoor subjects.
As I mentioned in that earlier review, reproducing real life colours can be difficult. Many photographers seek technical and aesthetic perfection in the same exposure, a quest that, by its very nature, is hampered by subjectivity. Go way back to the Auto-chrome process invented by the Lumiere brothers at the turn of the 20th century; then fast forward to the mid 1980s and look at reproductions made from Polaroid's 35mm Polachrome. Neither can claim to reproduce reality with any kind of technical accuracy, but their respective grainy pastel or oversaturated colourings give a pleasing result nonetheless.
Neither of these processes is about to make a comeback.
Photographers who choose film today want emulsions capable of rich real-life colour reproduction, minute detail resolving ability, excellent sharpness and, most importantly, the lowest possible grain threshold. Indeed, grain seems to have gained favour with both film and digital users in recent months with, on the one hand, film fans expressing a desire for cleaner-looking images and, on the other, digital users expressing delight for the film-like effect of certain sensors.
Well received
The new Ektar was so well received that medium format users clamoured for a roll film version, and this has now been released. It's come just before Cosina and Fujifilm's pending new high-tech medium format camera, named the Fujifilm GF670 in Japan and the Voigtlander Bessa III 667 outside it, making for a welcome reincarnation of an old concept. But only a few thousand Bessa III's will be released worldwide, and it will cost a similar amount, so it's good to find that plenty of original vintage models with similar features can turn in a creditable performance with this new film.
For this review I used a Hasselblad 500CM with T* coated Zeiss lenses and a 60 year old Super Baldax rangefinder folder fitted with an 80mm f/3.5 Baldanar coated lens. I used a Sekonic Studio DeLuxe II light meter to obtain incident readings, which were unadjusted for use on camera. All the negs were scanned on a Nikon 9000ED Super Coolscan (BJP, 01 April).
Scanning
The perceived problems with digitising film are often divided into two camps. One is the inconvenient amount of time you have to spend on the conversion process to get a usable image. The other is the cost, whether the cost of outsourcing scans or the investment required to buy into hardware capable of extracting the highest quality. Both are very real problems, but neither is more or less of a hassle than spending time in the darkroom or good money on a decent enlarger and lens. Both come with the film user package.
Today's technology offers a great variety of hardware at wildly different ends of the cost spectrum. If your endgame is a smudge on a page, there's little visible difference between a top-price high-end scanner or a cheap-as-chips single frame scan.
The higher investment provides full user control and an ongoing all-hours working facility, plus the means to obtain technically superior, detailed scans suitable for large format reproduction to billboard size. Lowest-cost scanning services are limited, but can generally produce files suitable for mechanical print reproduction up to A or B3 sizes. Furthermore, low-cost scans of film images to be printed out as ink-jet, dye-sub or traditional photo prints up to 8x12 inches work well for many client needs, and the output can be as good as, or better than, darkroom prints.
Attentive readers will have noted in past BJP film reviews that my illustrations are reproduced from scans obtained by different means - from high-end dedicated desk top scanners, as here, to mini-lab frame grabs. If you, like me, still use film for a lot of work, investing in a quality scanner will ultimately pay dividends.
The Nikon 9000ED is limited to handling up to medium format film-size, but it's capacity for extracting detail from dense shadow areas seems boundless. The packaged film holders are basic but quite functional and well engineered. They need a little patience to load correctly, especially with the larger format, but once you have the knack you can maintain a steady workflow. Grinding through high numbers of negs or trannies can seem endless, but the end result is rewarding.
Flatbed scanners are many and varied but only a few really stand out. The current dual lens Epson V750 Pro, priced at less than £1000, attains a 6400 optical resolution and performs well when used with the optional oil mounting film kit. Dry mounting in glassless carriers is nearly as good, producing digitised images in need of subtle Photoshop sharpening for larger reproduction. Older and discontinued platforms such as the Microtek ArtixScan have higher d-max ratings and use glassless carriers for most common film formats.
Files obtained from 120 reversal and colour negative using a Microtek are excellent but machines in good condition are harder to find.
Bold claims
Kodak claims that this new format emulsion captures highly saturated and ultra-vivid colour. I found this a little overstated for the 35mm stock, and I'm not convinced it's correct for the medium format either. Perhaps what Kodak means, and should have said, is that compared to E-6 reversal emulsions, Ektar 100 produces images which are a close match in those terms, when exposed under comparable lighting conditions. But being a negative, the extended tonal range has a slightly reductive effect on apparent overall colour brilliance, saturation and image contrast.
Straight out of the can, I prefer Ektar's rendition. The colour palette is pleasing with softer transition between colour hues in light and dark areas of the image than would be expected from transparencies. This is really a question of taste and each viewer will have a different
response. Once scanned, the Ektar 100 negatives offer a lot of latitude for colour saturation and contrast modification, so you will find your desired aesthetic. Frames exposed with the Hasselblad needed little or no post processing: negatives captured through the Super Baldax's much older lens often required fine-tuning with curves at the preview scan stage.
As with the smaller format, it's hard to dispute Kodak's claim that Ektar 100 is the world's finest-grained colour negative - it's possible it even exceeds the manufacturer's finest grained Ektachrome reversal material. It's exceptionally fine grained, with a Print Grain Index far lower than that of even the miniature format.
Thus, according to Kodak's own figures, the PGI for an 8x10 inch print magnified 4.4x from an original 120 format negative is less than 25, or more than 30% lower than for a print the same size enlarged from a 35mm Ektar 100 negative. The figures get better the larger the print size, but they should perhaps be qualified further.
A PGI of 25 represents the just visible threshold for most individuals with normal unaided eyesight for a given print size viewed at a specific distance. But this figure is obtained from prints made with diffuser type enlargers. Using enlargers fitted with a condenser light source changes the granular effect manifest in prints, and the same can be said of using film scanners with different light sources and film holders and the way in which the two interact.
Glassless holders used in scanners which project the film image straight through a high quality lens onto the surface of the capture sensor enable sharply defined scans with visible and equally well defined grain structure. Scanners employing similar mechanical methods, where the light path of the projected image is first bent using strip mirrors to reach the sensor, may compromise image quality if one or more of the strip mirrors is not perfectly clean. Flat bed scanners with a glass platen and mirrors, through which the projected image must pass and be bent, still further reduce the final image quality, while also reducing the effect of film grain.
Convenience
Despite the almost exponential rise in the quality of high-end digital capture, it still has a different aesthetic to film. Given the choice I still go for Kodachrome but Kodak hasn't made it easy to use the stuff and, with only one lab left in the world to process it, exposed rolls stack up in the fridge. The stock has not been available in medium format for years and I have never really liked the Ektachrome family.
That leaves colour negative, which has fluctuated in technical quality, colour palette and long term keeping properties since its invention, more or less. Now, at last, it seems the world's biggest manufacturer might be giving us something better.
Most labs, and even one or two supermarket minilabs, can handle the 120 format. Turnaround times are short, allowing you to pick up processed and, if necessary, scanned film within a few hours of shooting. When all else fails, distributors such as Morco (www.morco.uk.com) can supply 1 and 5 litre C-41 chemistry, enough to process a dozen or 60 rolls at a time.
I've used a lot of 35mm Ektar 100 since its launch and now the emulsion is available in the larger format, with excellent cross platform colour consistency. I will no doubt tackle many new projects with it.
