Film Friday - March 28th, 2025. Candido 200, 400 and 800 Films

Welcome to another Film Friday film review by your pals at Blue Moon Camera and Machine. With this review we are bringing the trio of color negative films from the Candido Collective into our library of film reviews. As you might imagine, we spend a lot of time here at Blue Moon shooting a lot of film. Even so, we like to really take our time, get to know a film as well as we can and produce the best images we can with that film to really show you what it is capable of. This means that sometimes it takes us a good long while to accumulate enough experience and material to craft one of these reviews. The Candido films first came to us late in the summer of 2023 and it is spring of 2025 as of the writing of this review. This is just to give you a sense of the time scale we sometimes work on here. We try not to make these “Our first roll with film X” type of reviews, but rather something with some real meat to dig into. So here goes!

In July or August of 2023 we were contacted by a Harry Bell of The Candido Collective. Harry’s goal with Candido Collective was to further excite and inspire folks to shoot more film. At the same time Harry wanted film photographers to “pay for flights, not film”, which translates to a philosophy that Harry wanted to get good film into photographers’ hands without charging them exorbitant prices. At that time in summer of 2023 many parts of the world (North America and Europe in particular) were still grappling with dramatically climbing prices of goods due to inflation. In addition, many film manufacturers had been dealing with their own global supply chain issues and had begun regularly raising prices on an annual basis to cover their own increasing costs. A roll of Kodak Portra 400 in 35mm was selling for around $15 a roll. Meanwhile Cinestill’s 800T was going for about $16.50 for a single roll of 35mm film. When Candido hit our shelves it had a retail price of $13.99, coming in under both the Kodak Portra and Cinestill films. If you are thinking, “But wait, I came here for photos not economics!” bear with us just a moment. In terms of understanding Candido we do think it is important to understand their motives and what they have been attempting to do with their films.

But that does bring us to an important question, “What is Candido film?”. The TLDR is that it is Kodak Vision3 motion picture film with the remjet layer removed for safe and easy processing in standard C-41 minilabs. Sound familiar? Yup, this is basically the same MO as Cinestill, as well as a handful of other film resellers. As a quick aside we were doing some historical digging on the internet in our prep for this article and found suggestions that during their very early days Candido may have been reboxing and reselling Fuji films as Candido, but as of 2023 they had shifted to Kodak Vision3 films.

Candido offers a trio of color negative films, all in 35mm only: Candido 200, Candido 400 and Candido 800.

Candido 200 is a lower speed ISO 200 tungsten balanced film based on Kodak 200T.

Candido 400 is a medium speed ISO 400 daylight-balanced film based on Kodak 250D.

And Candido 800 is a high speed ISO 800 tungsten-balanced film based off of Kodak 500T.

At some future point we may split Candido 200, 400 and 800 off into their own standalone reviews but for now we are going to address them all collectively. Let’s begin with Candido 200.

Candido 200

Candido 200 is a slower speed, finer grain film with a cooler color balance.

Candido 200 seems to essentially be Kodak Vision3 200T film, from which the folks at Candido Collective have removed the remjet layer and repackaged under the Candido name. Kodak 200T is a tungsten-balanced film designed to offer finer grain and better image detail than Kodak’s higher speed 500T tungsten film. By their nature, tungsten films have a cold color balance designed to correct for the yellowish cast given off by incandescent and tungsten lighting, thereby producing more natural colors under these lights. Ideally you use a tungsten film like Kodak 200T or Candido 200 when shooting indoors but they can be outdoor films as well. When shot in daylight conditions tungsten films will be on the cooler side. You have two options: use an 85 filter which offers a slight warming effect to the film and correcting its blue cast (at the cost of about 2/3 stop of speed - shoot your Candido 200 / Kodak 200T at ISO 125) or correct the colder cast in post. A third option of course is leave it as is.

While most photographers like to use tungsten-balanced films for tungsten/incandescent lighting, it is worth noting that we see many film photographers who take Cinestill 800T out in daylight shoots because they like the bluish, colder tint of the film. Color is a subjective thing, and you get to decide what looks best for you. In that vein, why not shoot Candido 200 outdoors during the day? It has very fine grain and produces really smooth images. It also has that halation effect (reddish glow around highlights) distinctive of cinema films that have had their remjet layers removed.

Candido 200 has soft contrast and a soft color palette. It is a great portrait film and if you use it in a snowy, cold environment then its natural cooler color tendencies will subtly emphasize the mood of the image. Image made with an Olympus XA.

Truth be told, we actually forgot about Candido’s colder color balance when making this image - the bluish tones are generally fairly subtle. But note the cold quality of what should be neutral grays such as the corner of sidewalk in the lower right. You can also see a bit of the halo effect around the door handle of the truck. Image made with an Olympus XA.

Candido 200’s slower film speed comes in handy for some creative shutter speed manipulations. By stopping our Olympus XA down to f11 or f16 we were able to get some slower shutter speeds on the drive to work one morning.

Candido 400

Candido 400 is a wonderful, all-around color film. It has a versatile film speed, soft grain and saturation and excels at either landscapes or portraiture.

Candido 400 is the middle sibling in the Candido Collective’s trio of color films. Based on Kodak Vision3 250D, this color film is daylight balanced and is best suited for outdoor work. It has a look very similar to Kodak Portra 400 and Cinestill 400D - smooth contrast, lower color saturation and fairly fine grain for its speed. This combination of factors means you can shoot Candido 400 for just about any of your photo needs. Heading out for some landscape photos? Yup. Doing some portraiture? Yup. Walking around the town making street photos? Yup. Still life or florals? Yup, that too. Not sure what you will run into? Go for Candido 400 as it will cover all your bases.

As with Candido 200, this film has also had its remjet layer removed and therefore shows a red halo halation effect around bright highlights. Use this to your advantage to really make photos unique to this type of film stock.

While you may be tempted to reach for a more saturated film when doing landscapes one nice thing to remember about a softer contrast film like Candido 400 is it handles nuance and subtle colors better. If you have a landscape that is more defined by a variation of tones and colors try a film like Candido 400 over one like Kodak Ektar 100, which tends to favor making colors bold and bright. Image made with an Olympus XA.

Candido 400 is a great film for portraiture and does a nice job creating softer skin tones without over saturating your portraits. Here the halation effect from the lack of a remjet layer is adding a little bit of a warm glow to the subjects.

Of course, if presented with bright and cheery colors Candido 400 is quite capable of faithfully reproducing those as well. Image made with a Canon EOS A2.

Candido 800

Candido 800 is your lowlight film While also a tungsten-balanced film designed to offset the yellowish cast found under tungsten lighting, its biggest advantage is its ISO 800 speed. When you are poor on light and need every bit of exposure you can get, Candido 800 will be your friend.

Candido 800 is the fastest of the three Candido films. Based on Kodak Vision3 500T, Candido 800 is a high speed, tungsten-balanced (remember, this means a natural colder blue color cast meant to correct for the yellowish color cast found under certain indoor lighting) film with higher grain. Candido 800 still retains the softer contrast and more even-handed color saturation of other Candido films and trades out higher grain for higher film speed. This film is meant primarily for use indoors and under low lighting conditions.

It is a fair question to ask, but if this film is based off of Kodak 500T, why is it rated at ISO 800? We do not fully know the answer to that quite honestly. When Cinestill unveiled their 800T film (also a modified version of Kodak Vision3 500T) they claimed that something in the remjet removal process helped accelerate the film speed and allowed it to be rated at ISO 800. We have no idea if this is true or what would account for that film speed increase. It is also possible that the processing in C-41 chemistry instead of the ECN2 process that cine films are typically developed in helps add speed to these films. And lastly it is worth pointing out that color negatives films are typically very forgiving with exposure and most handle up to 1 stop of underexposure without much need to compensate in development. So maybe Candido and Cinestill are banking on the forgiving nature of these films to make their 800 claims. We will say that Candido film does shoot well at ISO 800 but at that speed it does not forgive further underexposure very well. So if you are using this for your lowlight film, really make sure that ISO 800 is all the speed you need and not to underexpose this any farther.

In terms of its other qualities, Candido 800 is very consistent to 200 and 400 and feels like a high speed extension of Candido 200 in particular (one is Kodak 200T and the other is Kodak 500T after all). So expect more natural color saturation and a softer, smoother contrast. Gone too is that oft-mentioned remjet layer so expect the red glow of halation around your highlights.

We’ve shot a couple rolls of Candido 800 at this point. Our first roll was purely outdoors and daytime and we really liked the results we got there. As with Candido 200 the colder color shift is moderately subtle. The film does a nice job rendering natural colors, albeit a touch cool. It makes for a nice environmental portrait film too. And it absolutely loved all the available light that shooting outdoors during the day afforded it. One good trick for this film is that if you are going to use in daytime conditions, rate it at ISO 400 instead of ISO 800. If you don’t need that extra speed, instead give this film an extra stop of light. You will get better shadow detail and you will find color correcting Candido 800 to neutral midtones easier as well.

Meanwhile our second roll was shot at night, mostly indoors at our annual Customer Show event in the December. We were working with a fast 50mm f1.2 lens but knowing that the lighting was going to be dim (and under artificial lighting conditions) we figured we would see how Candido 800 did. The TLDR is that it did alright. The negatives were a touch thin (slightly underexposed) and this showed especially in the shadows where the grain was more apparent. But overall it at least allowed us fast enough shutter speeds to do handheld candid photography of the event. And while it did not fully correct all the yellow lighting we had to work with, it did help tamp it down a bit.

Despite being intended for lowlight and indoor use under artificial lighting, Candido 800 works pretty well outdoors and during the day. Image made with a Canon AE-1.

Of course just because you are outdoors during the day doesn’t always mean you have a ton of light. If it is a rainy, gray day and you are in a forest under tree cover, then the extra speed of Candido 800 can be quite beneficial. Image made with a Canon AE-1.

Just remember that it is a tungsten-balanced film so your midtone colors will have a slightly blueish bias to them. Image made with a Canon AE-1.

That is our wrap on the Candido films. Overall we have been enjoying the variety they bring to the film photography world, and even if they do overlap with Cinestill at least they offer a slightly less expensive alternative to those films. Saving a couple of dollars on a hobby that has gotten expensive never hurts! But cost aside, these three films have given us some new flavors to feed our cameras and shooting with films that have the halation effect is always fun. We do plan to keep working with these films and furthering our familiarity with them so we will continue to update this review with new images as we make them!

In the meantime we carry all three films in our inventory and you can purchase them right from our online store.

We have almost every film stock available on the market.

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