It’s rare that in the day of DSLR dominance, a company releases a new film – but in 2008 Kodak did just that and announced Ektar 100.

Ektar 100 is a ultra vivid / high saturation colour film that Kodak claims this is the lowest grain colour negative that money can buy. It was designed to offer the same kind of characteristics as a Fuji Velvia, but is a C41 based negative film meaning it can be developed at any old 1hr photolab. I’d only seen a handful of shots with it last month but heard enough good things that I decided that on our road trip to Death Valley, this would be my colour film of choice. Before we left, I shot a handful of images with it – here they are.

My initial take is that I’m extremely impressed. It’s always hard to describe exactly the characteristics of a film in quantitative terms but what I can say is that I love the way colours are rendered with Ektar – big fat saturation, without it being overcooked. Dynamic range looks superb (see first shot) and in particular, I love its renditions of the cooler tones (blues, purples, etc). While not as good as dedicated portrait films, skin tones look way better than some other ultra saturated films – it’s all v promising. I’ve not seen enough examples yet to judge whether the fine grain claim is true but again, initial gut feel is v positive.

I shot 9 exposures before I left for our trip – here are 6 of those images (the other two were duplicates while the first negative was exposed to light and therefore ruined). Next post will be images from our road trip. For now, here are those first test shots. All taken with an Olympus OM-4 + Olympus OM Zuiko 55mm f/1.2, Kodak Ektar 100. Scanned with Nikon Coolscan 5000

No processing: straight off the scan. I thought this came out beautifully – those blues are a knockout

Accidentally overexposed in camera but despite that didn’t lose any highlights… corrected using photoshop using levels

No processing, straight scan

No processing again

Again, no processing. Depending how your monitor’s configured, this will either look just right or too dark.

And last shot – straight scan once again