Harman Technologies, (the makers of Ilford B&W film in Mobberly, England) recently released a brand new color negative film named Phoenix 200. This is a standard C-41 film that can be processed and any commercial lab.
Being brand new and rather experimental, it is very different from any other film on the market. It even looks weird, kinda like a cross-processed film. Leveraging off of their XP-2 technology and hiring their own scientists, they wanted to try to produce a film on the same equipment they currently use to manufacture their B&W films.
Harman has been quite open that this is a first attempt and that while this film is a "finished" product. They will learn from it and get better and better with future color film product releases.
In testing the film, I shot it in my Nikon F3HP and sent it off to Richard Photo Lab for develop and scan only. The results I received back were, let's say less than stellar. The images had a yellowish, greenish, brown overall cast that, while it looked cool, definitely wasn't representative what Harman showed us a sample images.
As many of you know, I've been focused on DSLR digitizing on my film these days so I took the very same negatives and started copying the processed negatives using my Canon DSLR camera and a macro lens. My files were processed and converted using Negative Lab Pro plug-in for Lightroom and my copy rig is from Negative Supply.
I was super surprised at the results and how "normal" or at least "more normal" my new Harman Phoenix film looked.
Now this film is not a perfect film. It wasn't intended to be a Kodak or Fuji quality film but more of a proof of concept to see if they could even do it.
Harman has published recommended channel adjustments for Fuji Frontier and Noritsu machines but that information hadn't trickled down to them yet as of the initial testing of this film.
All I can say is kudos to Harman for attempting this and adding to the increasing variety of films on the market.
While the scanned results you get from a lab may not be great, I can say with absolute confidence that using a DSLR camera with macro lens, a Negative Supply Kit and Negative Lab Pro Plug-in for Lightroom will yield excellent results with Harman Phoenix 200 color negative film.
I hope this helps.
