We’re going to think positive today for today’s Film Friday. Ha, pun intended. After Kodak E100 was first released in 2018 it took us a while to get around to reviewing it for Film Friday. We really try to spend our time with a film in order to get to know it, rather than simply taking a walk around the block and blowing through a roll. That meant using it in both 35mm and 120. However, the supply of medium format was very hit and miss for a while after its 2019 release. The long story short was that we finally worked some Ektachrome E100 through our various cameras and produced some sample images and enough familiarity to be able to give this film its Film Friday spotlight. So here goes.

Back in September of 2018 when Kodak announced they were bringing back Ektachrome E100 the photography world was both shocked and elated. It really was big news. While Kodak Alaris had been growing in stability, and Ilford seemed to be holding their own as well, many aspects of the film market still seemed to be shrinking. It was a bit surprising we still had Fuji slide films available to us, so to hear that Kodak was investing in a color positive film seemed miraculous indeed.

When that E100 finally reached market photographers were excited as not that many had actually shot much slide film prior to E100’s launch. But us film photographers love a new film regardless of its type. At first we only had E100 available in 35mm and Super 8 (gotta give a nod to all the motion picture photographers out there). We had to wait another year to get E100 in 120 and … 4x5! Along the way we also picked up a 16mm Ektachrome 100D. Life is grand.

One of our very first Ektachrome E100 exposures once the 120 format hit our shop. Image made with a Pentax 67.

Before we dig too much farther into E100 specifically, let us make a pitch for slide film in general. We have long thought that shooting slide is a bit of a magical process, with most of that magic coming the moment you lay the developed film out on a light table. It is like looking through little windows back into the moments in which you made the images. There are few more beautiful things in the world of analog photography than a well-exposed slide. It is only one step removed from the reality that saw it created. There is no interpretation done by a printer or scanner. What you see is what you get. If the existing light had a color cast, it is there in the slide. If you over or under exposed, it is there in the slide. Some photographers find this a bit intimidating, but we would encourage you to think differently. Negative film can be so forgiving that it is sort of like hitting the ocean from the beach; as long as you are pointed in the right direction you are bound to get something. But that also means that if your camera’s meter is not accurate, or you yourself are not very accurate, the film will cover that up. Not so with slide film, it will show you your exposures - warts and all. Sure, this may mean that initially you miss some shots but the upshot is that you will learn your camera’s meter pretty fast and will hone your own metering skills quite rapidly. Then that intimidation becomes confidence in one’s abilities and experience. The “what you see is what you get” nature of slide film is also a great way to learn about light and color temperature. Again, the flexibility of negative film means we often don’t have to think about this much. Just shoot and let the printing or scanning fix it. And to some extent that works with slide film too, but even if it gets corrected in scanner, you still have the original slides to compare to, and reading a positive film is so much more direct than reading a negative film with its reversed colors and orange base.

So this is our pitch for slide film. First, it looks amazing when laid out backlit on a light table. Second, it will make you a better photographer just by being a bit more demanding and showing you the results of your efforts quite directly. But now on to E100 directly.

First up: its colors. Ektachrome E100 touts very neutral and natural colors. There is not much vibrancy or saturation going on here, at least no more so than is naturally occurring in front of you. It renders really neutral gray tones across different levels of exposure and works really well with skin tones as well. Many slide film users really enjoy the vivid saturation of Fuji’s Velvia and Provia films, but many film photographers also think those films’ colors are a bit too much. If you fall into that second group, then E100 will make you very happy.

Alongside that neutral color rendition is a very smooth tonal curve as well. Slide film is known for having a narrower latitude and being a bit less forgiving of extreme contrast. Kodak E100 won’t exacerbate this at all, in fact it does a pretty good job of recording shadow detail and the data sheet claims it has a great DMin for very pure whites. This last we have not tested, but it sounds like it could be nice. Another thing we have not tested ourselves but have heard from other photographers is that E100 forgives a reasonable amount of underexposure. We read one account where a photographer shot it at 1.3 stops under box speed and still pulled some great detail out of the film after having it scanned.

And then there are the two aspects about Ektachrome E100 that have really impressed photographers: its grain and its sharpness. E100 uses the same T-grain technology that Kodak employees in most of their other professional films. The grain of E100 is remarkably tight and especially if you are using 120 or 4x5, it can be virtually invisible. In part because of that fine grain, E100 is also a pretty sharp film. Even if you don’t shoot medium format, as long as you pair it with decent lenses and good technique you are going to get some surprisingly crisp images with quite a bit of detail. We don’t think about it too much, but the technology behind film emulsions is constantly improving. It may not have the same market forces behind it that it did a couple decades ago, but our films are constantly getting better and E100 is a great example of this. While we haven’t done so just yet, we’d love to put this film next to some Kodak Ektar and see how the two compare in terms of their grain and sharpness. We wouldn’t be surprised at all if E100 won.

While we wouldn’t call E100 a saturated film, if you use it in rich, colorful lighting it will faithfully reproduce those colors… without running away with them. Image made with a Minolta X-370.

We overexposed this one a bit (unintentionally, whoops) but it still turned out nicely, especially once scanned and balanced a bit. Slide film often gets labeled as unforgiving, but that is a bit unfair in our opinion. It will tolerate more than it … — We overexposed this one a bit (unintentionally, whoops) but it still turned out nicely, especially once scanned and balanced a bit. Slide film often gets labeled as unforgiving, but that is a bit unfair in our opinion. It will tolerate more than it is usually given credit for. Image made with a Pentax 67.

So you have our dual-pronged pitch for trying some Kodak Ektachrome E100. On the one hand, slide film in general can be a lot of fun and make you a better photographer in the process. On the other hand, Kodak’s new E100 film produces great results that enjoy super fine grain, a high degree of sharpness and faithful color reproduction. Oh yeah, it doesn’t even require reciprocity compensation until you pass 10 second exposures and even then corrections are fairly light up to 2 minutes. We almost forgot to mention that.

Last but not least is the topic of cross-processing. There is a sizable contingent of photographers out there who really enjoy the cross-process look and we are often asked how a particular slide film will cross-process, or which films we recommend for cross-processing. Before we take a look at Ektachrome E100 let’s have a brief explanation of what cross-processing is because there are likely some of you in our audience who are unfamiliar with the term. All films have a native chemical process used for developing them. For example, color negative films such as Portra 400 are processed in C-41 chemistry while color positive films like Ektachrome E100 are developed in E-6 chemistry. There is also ECN-2 which is the process for motion picture color negative films. Cross-processing is simply the practice of taking an E-6 slide film and running it through C-41, or taking a color negative C-41 film and putting it through E-6 (or yes, taking a motion picture film and running it in C-41, this is what happens with your Cinestill film, by the way, so there is good odds you have actually tried cross-processing without even realizing it). Running slide film through C-41 is the most popular form of cross-processing, but we have a few customers who do negative film in E-6 chemistry as well. Since you are putting a film through a chemical process it wasn’t intended for there are side effects. In the case of cross-processing slide film this usually means the results are negatives (because it is going through the C-41 negative process) that have exaggerated contrast, grain and color saturation. Cross-processed slide film also tends to have heavy color casts but this varies from film to film. Fuji films, for example, tend to produce images with heavy yellow/green casts when cross-processed.

With that explanation in hand, let’s take a quick look at a couple of cross-processed Ektachrome E100 images.

A panoramic view of Oregon’s Crater Lake created by compositing multiple images made on a Zero Image 2000 pinhole camera. Kodak Ektachrome E100 cross-processed in C-41 chemistry.

As you can see, when Ektachrome E100 is cross-processed it picks up a huge amount of contrast, which also drives up its color saturation, but at the same time it preserves pretty normal colors with hardly any color cast. It makes a great film if you are looking to produce some eye-wateringly punchy images but don’t want to deal with the heavy color casts that other slide films offer. Historically speaking, this has long been one of the reasons we have liked cross-processing Kodak slide films. Back in the day when we could choose from Kodak EPY or EPT or E100VS, we loved cross-processing them for their hyper-saturated, but “natural” colors. So it makes us happy to see that Ektachrome E100 has unintentionally carried on that tradition. If you haven’t experimented with cross-processing, E100 is a great film to try it out with!

There you go, so why not pick up a roll? Shoot positive. Or shoot negative and cross-process. We’ll give you a shortcut link to Ektachrome E100 in our inventory right here. The rest we leave up to you. But before you go, why not a few more sample images.

Another image from our first ever roll of E100 in 120 that we fed through a hungry Pentax 67.

It is easy to expose a lot of film quickly at the Oregon coast. Image made with a Minolta X-370.

And one last image, also shot in the aforementioned Minolta X-370.

Film Friday - October 18th 2024. Kodak Ektachrome E100