Harman Phoenix 200 – My First Roll Impressions

On the 1st December 2023, after much build up and a social media leak, which I promptly avoided – I hate spoilers. Harman Technology (the company behind Ilford black and white films, papers and chemistry) released their first ever 35mm COLOUR film – Harman Phoenix 200.

At first thought this might not sound unusual. Us film photographers have become quite use to new brands hitting the market, but when you realise this is not just a respooled existing film stock or an ‘its in development maybe you’ll see it, but mostly you won’t…’ Harman Phoenix is actually a BRAND NEW, experimental, made from scratch colour emulsion and its on the shelves worldwide right now! Pretty mind blowing and definitely Christmas come early in my house.

Plenty has been said about Harman Phoenix’s creation and characteristics (see the video here) and it seems just about everyone and their uncle, who happens to be a film photography youtuber has had advance sample roll/s to play with. Sadly not me… maybe I should start a YouTube channel. Still, I’ve happily let these first test bunnies have a go and have reaped the reward of seeing their early results to influence how I’ve taken my first roll.

So, let me share my results here, warts and all, every image from the 36 exposure roll – with a couple of bonus frames which I usually get with the Leica. I’ll add some personal thoughts about Harman Phoenix at the end.

Loading up my ‘best’ camera – a Leica MP with 35mm Summicron f2 lens. I set my cameras build in meter to ISO 100, even though its a 200 speed, I’d seen plenty of examples of poor shadow detail and people saying “…next time I’d shoot it over exposed”.

The first half of the roll started off on a family day out in Covent Garden, London. It started out as a cloudy dull day but brightened up at dusk. I figured the Christmas themed lights would be interesting and I was keen to see the halo effect from different light sources. The second half of the roll was taken on a full on winter sunshine day wandering my local neighbourhood. I was interested to see how it would cope with the extremes in bright and dark and give me a better idea on how to meter for the next couple of rolls I have waiting for me.

I developed the film at home using Bellini Foto C41 and then scanned using a Plustek Opticfilm 8200i and SilverFast SE 8 software using the negafix setting set to – vendor – other; film – other; ISO/ASA – standard.

Images were edited in Lightroom and I did some very minor adjustments, mostly in the deep shadows where I had to close the gap down on the black end of the histogram. One of the images (my daughter next to the telephone box) I made a very slight adjustment to the colour temperature. But what you see is what I got.

So, there we have it. What do you think? Obviously, not going to burn up the world with the subject material, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to see for myself what this film could do with different exposure situations and typical environments I find myself in.

My first impressions of Harman Phoenix

I really enjoyed the results. The colours are delightful – punchy with strong contrast. Rich reds, deep blues, vibrant greens. It handled the dynamic range of many of the scenes much better than I expected. Maybe because I did rate it at iso 100, I got lots of detail in the shadows and room to play with the exposures without the image being destroyed. In a few cases, where the highlights are really bright and I metered for the shadows, I have lost a bit too much. The doorway female figurehead is all but blown out. So too is the balcony windows and satellite dish on the image with the blue shed doors. Even in this last tree photo the highlights on the roots are gone. This is a bit of a shock to the system, as that rarely happens to me over-exposuring C41 film. But hey, on the up, all the detail in the dark shrub area I could reveal with a tweak of the shadow slider in Lightroom. It’s useful to know this going forward, as I will pay more attention to what I don’t want to lose in a picture when metering in extreme lighting conditions.

On to the much discussed love it or hate it halation, the red ‘halo-ing’ effect around bright light sources. I’m on the fence! I really like it when its on things you expect – like street lights, neon shop signs, sun flare etc. I enjoy it less on things like trees, railings and my daughters eye lids. Ok, I know the portrait is slightly overexposed and she’s facing bright fairy lights…but come on, weird right?!

As a film grain fan I found the grain here to be lovely. Sure, it is a surprise to see so much of it in a 200 box speed film, but I could live with it. It adds a retro filmic quality I enjoy and part of why I’d continue to use film cameras over just digital. On the downside one element I noticed was the sharpness (acutance) wasn’t quite as good as I’m use to with other colour films. Maybe, that’s down to my own developing and scanning technique or the wider apertures I had to use for some of the lower light conditions but it did make me wonder if that’s an element of the current film characteristic, and something that will be a priority for improvement in the future.

I think by now, if you’ve made it this far, you can probably tell I’m delighted with my results from Harman Phoenix!!

Well done Harman Photo. Yes, it is a film in the early stages of development, but I love you even more for just going for it and delivering something that is already so useable, and for being upfront about its imperfections and the investment you need to continue the journey towards improving a new colour film stock for the future. I’m definitely jumping on the bus ride and I can’t wait to see where you take it next… different speeds, larger formats. Woo hooo – lets do this and keep film alive!!

Find out more about Harman Phoenix 200 here: HARMAN Phoenix (harmanphoto.co.uk) and certainly a search on Youtube will reveal a ton of user reviews.

As always, if you have any questions for me about using this film please drop me a line. Comments welcome below. Thanks for reading.