I’m a little late to the party but here is my short review of the semi-famous Kodak Gold emulsion that was recently introduced. I got a propack of the stuff before a trip to Greece, where I shot it with a Mamiya 6.
I noticed when loading the film that it has the new Kodak backing paper. It feels very glossy and plasticky. But it doesn’t really matter, as long as I don’t get numbers stuck on my images again (there was a big problem with 120 backing papers recently).
When developing the film I noticed also that this is coated on ESTAR. That was a bit surprising. I haven’t used a 120 film with the polyester base before. Usually it’s just repackaged aerial films that have the polyester base and all professional camera films use triacetate. The downside of ESTAR is that it’s thinner, and much more flimsy. It is also very very strong, it will not snap or tear. Sometimes that is a problem, if you have an issue with your camera you might rather the film snaps than cogs get stripped. The flimsiness also makes it more difficult to load into a Paterson reel. But the films dried flat, can’t complain really.
I set the camera to ISO160 to give it a little extra punch and then just metered normally, average metering. It is clear that this film works great for sunny days. It has that Portra yellowish tone, everything leaning towards the warmer side. I’m not super impressed with the latitude nor the grain. But in medium format the grain is already so small so it doesn’t really matter. And latitude is still way better than slide film.
Overall it is a great “walking around” film. It is not especially good at anything but it is also not very bad at anything either. Skin tones look decent, greens are not very vibrant but decent. Red tones are a little bit mellow, blues go easily into the “pastel blue” area but that’s fine too because you get nice skies.
After the price hikes of the past few years, Portra is now so expensive that I don’t really want to waste it on random vacation pictures. Not that Gold 200 is cheap but it’s at a price point where I can justify taking some pictures just for fun without thinking about it too much.
Here are some images from Thessaloniki, Greece.
Alright, that’s it for this time. Let me know what you think. Please take a look in the shop and maybe purchase my zines to support this blog.