Film Friday - January 12th, 2024. Rollei Superpan 200

Rollei Superpan 200 is a curious sort of film… all the better reason to run a Film Friday feature on it.

The first impression we would give you of Superpan 200 is that on the surface it can be easily unimpressive, but dig a bit deeper and Superpan quickly reveals that it has quite a bag of tricks at its disposal. It is a superpanchromatic b&w film that not only has sensitivity out to about 775nm but also cuts off dramatically at the other end of the spectrum right about 340nm - more on that below. Additionally, it boasts a very clear polyester base that has helped earn it the title of successor to the famed Agfa Scala 200 film as a prime candidate for reversal processing. We’ll talk a bit more about that below as well, but first let’s cover just the basics of Rollei Superpan 200.

Despite the Rollei brand name, the film is made by Agfa-Gavaert in Belgium and distributed by Maco Direct in Germany. Rollei has little to do with this film other than licensing its name. Rollei Superpan 200 seems to be identical to Agfa Aviphot Pan 200, an industrial, technical and aerial surveillance film. We say “seems” to be because the two share the same data sheet but in the world of European film manufacturing and the somewhat opaque deals involved you never quite know for sure and we hesitate to present what are essentially well-educated guesses as being too certain. Whether Maco Direct simply buys rolls of Aviphot Pan 200 and has them reboxed with their brand name, or if they have a special contract for Agfa-Gavaert to coat special batches to their tweaked specifications using the Aviphot emulsion we cannot say for certain. But generally speaking, it is safe to assume that the two films are more or less identical. This is important to remember because if you go searching the Internet for 4x5 sheets of Rollei Superpan 200 you don’t turn up anything, however if you instead search for Aviphot 200 4x5 you can find boxes of the stuff on eBay.

While knowing a bit about the history of a film can be helpful, let’s set Superpan’s origins aside now and concentrate on what you can do with the film today.

Rollei Superpan 200 is capable of producing some pretty spectacular results when used in certain ways. Image made with a Hasselblad 500C and an R72 filter.

Yes, you can shoot Rollei Superpan straight up, unfiltered, as a normal b&w ISO 200 film. Personally this is not our preference. It is cool to have another ISO 200 option out there as they are not common. You can count them on one hand in fact: Fomapan 200 and Ilford SFX 200. When we are looking to shoot an ISO 200 film we usually turn to Fomapan, or we will rarely pull Tri-X to serve that need. In short, Superpan 200 does offer another option in that category of speeds but the results it brings generally aren’t that exciting.

So let’s get into where Superpan 200 does deliver exciting results: the infrared. Every film should have a hook - that reason you show it to another photographer and say, “you really have to try this stuff because______”. With Superpan 200 its hook for us is its infrared capabilities. There are a few other b&w infrared films out there on the market, most notably Ilford SFX and Rollei Infrared, so its worth comparing Superpan 200 to those two films as a means of helping place it in this context. In regard to Ilford SFX, Superpan 200 has roughly the same level of IR sensitivity, as both films extend out to about 750nm. Each can be used in pretty similar fashion for making infrared images. Both films are also available in 35mm and 120. Grain is where they differ, with Superpan 200 being the moderately less grainy of the two. Meanwhile, Rollei Infrared has the higher IR sensitivity, stretching out to about 820nm but counter-intuitively, Rollei film seems to slow down more behind IR filters. This relates to filter factors. When we shoot Rollei Infrared, we typically use an R72 filter and rate the film at about ISO 6 - a six stop filter factor compensation from the film’s “native” ISO 400. With Superpan 200 we initially exposed it with the same six stop factor and quickly noticed we were producing overexposed negatives, so we dialed that back to a five stop factor, thus we rate Superpan 200 at the same ISO 6 as we do Rollei Infrared behind the same type of filter. A point in Rollei Infrared’s favor is that it is available in 4x5 sheet film.

For those new to infrared photography, allow us a quick digression to explain how filtering infrared films work. Infrared films are what are sometimes called “super panchromatic”: they have sensitivity not only to the visible spectrum of light but beyond the red end and into infrared. When you use infrared film without any filters, you pick up exposure both from visible and infrared light, with the former typically drowning out the exposure of the latter. The typical process with infrared film is to place a red, or deep red, filter in front of the lens to block out as much of the visible exposure as possible, allowing through only the IR light to expose the film. This is how you produce images that have the “wood effect” where vegetation glows a snowy white. Using infrared film with only a red filter will darken blue skies and make skin glow but typically will not produce the white grass and leaves you see in the IR examples here. The catch is that those deep IR filters cut out a lot of light and therefore require a lot of extra exposure, hence the filter factor we mentioned above.

Rollei Superpan 200 at its infrared best showing a grassy field as snow white and a blue sky as a dramatic near-black tone. Image made with a Reality So Subtle 6x12 pinhole camera fitted with a Hoya R72 filter.

While we worry we may be pigeonholing this film a tad, its strength really does lie in making infrared images, much in the same way that most photographers don’t use Rollei Infrared for “normal” black and white photography. But Superpan 200 does have another arrow in its quiver worth mentioning and that is as a successor to Agfa Scala 200 for reversal processing. Agfa Scala 200 was a somewhat popular film over a decade ago (it is actually still around in a slightly different modern update but that is a topic for another day) as a film optimized for b&w reversal processing. It is easy to think of slides as solely the realm of color photography but it is in some ways easier to process b&w film as slides than it is color. While pretty much any b&w film can be reversal processed, not all do so equally. Agfa Scala made its name as a film that produced beautiful b&w slides and now Rollei Superpan 200 has taken up that mantle. A big part of it is that Superpan’s emulsion lies on a clear polyester base. The clarity of the film base is really important for b&w slides as it is this clear base that will produce the film’s black. Any density and the resulting slides will suffer from blacks that are less deep and rich. But Superpan 200 also reversal develops into images with lovely tonality and sharpness. The country’s leading expert on b&w processing, the DR5 lab, praises Superpan 200 as being the closest thing out there to Agfa Scala. So it doesn’t have to be solely about infrared photography with Superpan 200, this stuff would be a great candidate for experimenting with a roll of b&w slides as well. If this is something you have never tried, we cannot recommend it enough, they are things of beauty. We don’t have any samples to share with you but honestly, even if we did mere digital scans would never do the depth of the original slide justice. Take our word on it and make it a goal to have DR5 process a roll of Superpan for you sometime this summer. You’ll be glad you tried it.

Let’s round out some of Superpan’s other features now as a way of wrapping this review up. In terms of grain, we would say that Superpan is average. We wouldn’t call it fine grain but it also is not normally quite as grainy as most ISO 400 films either. It has a cubic grain structure, so it does have a classic look to it. But Superpan is not a forgiving film. It has pretty narrow latitude and doesn’t really like much over or under exposure. We have noticed while shooting this film that it does not let you get away with nearly as much as most other b&w negative films will. Likewise, it does care to be pushed or pulled much. You can push it up one stop and that helps bump the contrast up but we don’t recommend going beyond that. We also noticed that if you do err on the side of over exposure, Superpan 200 gets really grainy, really fast. So if you want a super gritty look, then over exposure and/or push the developing. Here, we have a couple over exposed images to share.

Superpan 200 over exposed by 2-3 stops. It has lost a lot of tonality and picked up a tone of grain. Image made with a Hasselblad 500C and an R72 filter.

Another over exposed Superpan 200. This film starts to lose contrast quickly when over exposed and a lot of work had to be done in post to bring some of it back. At the same time the grain gets very heavy. Image made with a Hasselblad Flexbody and an R72 filter.

While Superpan may be quick to show grain, the film is also very sharp and seems very detailed. This would make sense given its history as a surveillance and industrial film where sharp detail is generally desired. In the process of prepping these sample images we were frequently surprised by how sharp fine details were in the images as we zoomed in to clean up dust introduced during scanning. While we could not find any published data on resolution, having worked closely with many other b&w films in similar fashion, we feel like Superpan 200 does a good job of holding its own in this department.

And since a popular method of using Superpan 200 is for infrared photography behind a deep R72 filter, it is relevant to give mention to the film’s reciprocity characteristics. Again, there is no real official data out there, just collected experience from Superpan 200 users like us. Our experience is that Superpan 200 does pretty well for exposures between 1-30 seconds. As a rule of thumb we add one stop of exposure in this range and generally end up with healthy negatives. In fact, some of those heavily over exposed images resulted in us adding more than one stop of extra exposure while also calculating a filter factor of six, instead of five, stops. The gist is that even though you will likely have to do some long exposures with Superpan of multiple seconds if you intend to shoot it IR, the film doesn’t mind much at all and requires an average, if slightly less, amount of correction for those long exposures.

While Superpan 200 should be given some compensation for reciprocity failure during longer exposures, it does not seem to need a lot. Give it 1/2 stop for exposures up to 10 seconds, and a full stop for exposures up to 30 seconds and see how that treats you. Image made with a Hasselblad 500C.

That is our pitch/review of Superpan 200. While the film can be used in a few different ways, our favorite is clearly as an infrared film and we’d encourage you to try it this way as well. The sunnier days make for great opportunities to do some infrared photography! Just make sure you pick up an R72 filter to get the full effect, or as deep a red filter as you can find. Word of caution though, we don’t recommend getting any IR filter beyond R72 otherwise you risk blocking out too much of the spectrum and ending up with blank film! That would not be any fun.

It is also worth mentioning that Superpan 200 is the middle sibling in Rollei’s Retro line of films that includes Retro 80S and Retro 400S. We will eventually do Film Fridays on both of these films as well, but much of what we said today applies equally to these other films as well, scaled up or down for their respective speeds. Something to keep in mind.

We usually have Rollei Superpan 200 in stock in both 35mm and 120, and you can find it right here on our website.

Also, don’t forget to grab an R72 filter. They are a tad expensive but well worth it to really make those IR images glow.

And now to wrap this up with a few more sample photos for your viewing pleasure. Thanks for stopping by for another Film Friday!

We stuck pretty close to home for many of these rolls, so we have a lot of infrared St. Johns Bridge images. Made with a Hasselblad 500C.

Image made with a Hasselblad 500C

Superpan 200 goes to the Oregon coast on a clear sunny day. Image made with a Pentax 67 fitted with a LensBaby.

Wispy clouds in blue skies make for particularly dramatic subject matter for Superpan 200 filtered for infrared photography.

We try to remind ourselves that not all images of the nearby Willamette River need involve the St. Johns Bridge. Image made with a Hasselblad 500C.

And finally a couple of images of Rollei Superpan without any filtration.

When shot unfiltered, Rollei Superpan offers a high contrast look that can be great for adding a bit of drama to your image’s tonality.