Everytime we go to Disney World on a weekend getaway, there is another beneficiary of our vacation: my local professional photo lab. The most recent trip yielded five rolls of new park pictures to have processed. When I got them back and began to review them, I was surprised to see the results of an experiment I had conducted with one of my rolls.
Awhile back in a package of my regular Kodak Max film I received a sample 12 exposure roll of the “new’ Kodak Ultra Color film. (I have learned from my research that it is actually the same film that Kodak has been selling for some time under the Portra 400UC name to professional photographers, but has been repackaged to market to a consumer market.) I was intrigued enough by seeing this new sample to purchase a 36 exposure roll of the Ultra Color 400 to experiment with.
Our family trip a week ago to the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival seemed the perfect chance to test the color capability of the film, between the colors of the park and flowers, so I threw it in my camera supplies for the event. I put in my camera as the second roll of the day when we were about to enter the World Showcase. The area was bursting with blossoms as all of the pavillions put on their best displays for the Flower & Garden festival. The riot of colors seemed like a perfect time to start playing with my “ultra color” film. The 36 exposure roll lasted me the rest of the day. I photographed the garden displays, character encounters, family members enjoying the sights, and even a few indoor shots. There was action shots, scenic shots, wide angle and zoom, flash and natural light.
When we got home I took the film to the professional lab I use along with the other 4 rolls from the weekend and waited to compare the results. When I got the processed film back and began to peruse it, I was amazed at the results! The 400UC was visibly several steps better on a 4×6 print in virtually every photographic condition I used it in compared to the Kodak Max Versatility 400 I shot the rest of the weekend. I had expected a marginal difference but not the dramatic results I was seeing! The photos I took in the British pavillion gardens are warmer, and have much more color and texture than the ones shot moments earlier with the Max Versatility film. It was the same with all the photos – an amazing level of detail and fine grained detail along with vivid color. I thought you had to use an SLR to get that kind of quality improvement. I never thought I would see photographs like that out of my Polaroid point-and-shoot camera.
After the wonderful results I witnessed, I did some research on the film on the Kodak website. I compared the Print Grain Index (higher number means grainier pictures) of three 400 speed films by Kodak: the Max Versatility, High Definition, and Ultra Color. The Max Versatility had the highest PGI with a rating of 48, not particularly surprising. The more interesting comparison is between the High Definition and the UC film. They are practically identical with ratings of 39 and 40, respectively. But despite it’s marginally lower PGI, I have not been as impressed with the High Definition film in previous trials of it as I was with the UC in this usage. Probably the difference is in the color capabilities. The UC lives up to it’s name with incredible color qualities. Then I went a step further and researched price. The only website I could find selling all three films was RitzCamera.com. Predictably the UC film was the most expensive, selling for $6 for a 36 exposure roll. The High Definition was the mid-priced of the three at $9.99 for 75 exposures and the Max versatility was cheapest at $11 for 125 exposures. It works out to $.166, $.133 and $.088 per exposure for the three films.
Given that the Max Versatility is almost half the price of the UC film, would I use the UC all the time? Unfortunately, I and most other scrapbookers don’t have the budget to use it for everything! But I believe all three of these films can and should have a place in the film repertoire of a serious scrapbooker. Use the Max Versatility for those everyday snapshots or when you know you are going to be using a lot of film on an event that is not going to be an absolutely fabulous page. When you are shooting something that you know you will likely want to make lots of enlargemenets of but don’t need so much color capability, go with the High Definition. But when you want to play with your camera and ALL of it’s abilities, or are shooting something special or that you know you will want to get every ounce possible of quality out of for it’s use, I can recommend the Ultra Color as a great investment!
For more information on the film discussed here, go to:
Kodak Film Info
Shutterbug UC Film Review
About Nancy Nally
Very interesting read, Nancy! I LOVED portra film when I was using my film camera…will have to experiment with a roll of this Ultra film and dust off my Nikon film camera! Thanks for the info…always so insightful! Teri
Nancy, did you do any portraits with the UC? My photolab tech said it was GREAT film for intense colors (like flowers or autumn leaves….) but tended to be weak when it came to the subtlties of flesh tones…I’d be curious what your eperience with this was….
Interesting question about the skin tones on the UC film! I went back and looked again at the pictures with special attention to the people. The majority of the photos didn’t have human subjects but in those that did, the skin tones didn’t seem that bad. In a few the lighting was horrendous and the slightly off skin tones can easily be attributed to that. I’ve come to expect that problem when shooting in certain settings at Disney World. The shots outdoors in natural light had excellent skin tones. The end of the roll was shot indoors at night in our poorly light hotel room, pictures of our daughter playing. I shot the end of the UC roll and then loaded a roll of Max Versatility, same ISO just different brand of the Kodak film. You really can’t tell the photos from the end of the UC roll and the start of the Max Versatility roll apart based on skin tone, even in the close-ups of my daughter. The lighting was awful but the skin tone is fairly consistent in that setting between the two films. How much of that was done in the lab by my processor, I don’t know….Despite the fact that in that particular type of lighting there wasn’t much difference between the two film’s results, I still would recommend the UC film for when superior results are desired in certain situations based on the markedly superior results it achieved in other settings. Nothing is going to fully compensate for poor lighting…but in optimum conditions the film really can strut it’s stuff!