We all heard the news that Kodak Alaris is bringing back Ektrachrome 100 slide film - it is available since last year in 35 mm format and supposed to be produced in 120 film format this year. Much less known is one of the former relatives of this film - the Ektrachrome 400. Other than a few shootout videos taken with expired rolls of this film, there is not much found online about it. In 2013, all available Ektrachrome films were discontinued including the Ektachrome 400. You can still find some expired Ektachrome 400 film online, but supply especially for the medium-format 120 film size is limited and quite expensive for the age of the film. I was lucky that a friend of mine handed me several rolls of well-stored 120-format based Ektrachrome 400X (EPL) film with expiration date 2007 which I could use with my medium format cameras. I shot the first roll of this film with my Hasselblad 500 C/M in 6x6 cm format and developed the exposed film myself with the required E-6 color slide film process. Since there is not much out there describing the main properties of this film, I decided to write this short film review of it. 

With regular color negative film, there is the rule of thumb that for every 10 years of storage, the film loses 1 stop of sensitivity when stored well. This rule does not easily apply to color slide (positive) film since overexposure can easily be tolerated by negative film but not by slide film! I decided to be cautious on my first trial run with the Ektrachrome 400 slide film even it was already 12 years old. I didn't want to risk overexposing the film by applying one stop exposure upfront without having tested it first (meaning to use it as an ISO 200 film).  I set my Gossen light meter to ISO 400 sensitivity and went from there. As location for testing, I selected Fort Hancock at Sandy Hook/NJ since I am very familiar with this place. It provides good examples for yellowish, greenish, and brown decaying structures in high contrast scenes depending on the light. I chose a sunny day with a bit of overcast in the sky since I wanted to see how the colors would be registered by this film. 

As first frame with this film, I selected the famous lighthouse tower which was recently repainted in a glowing white. Since so much light is reflected from the white paint, I added an additional stop of exposure to the metered value to avoid underexposure in the darker areas. I was afraid that I would still blow out the sky by doing so but simply gave it a try. I used a circular 2-stop ND glass filter to accommodate the limit of 1/500s of the camera and avoiding to close down the lens aperture to the limit. To my surprise, the frame turned out nearly perfect - I could see details in the shadows as well as structure in the white of the tower. This first frame already revealed one main distinguished property of this film - there was no washout of the sky, instead it turned out fully blue like if I had used a polarizer. Some cyan color sneaked into the white of the lighthouse, so I de-saturated a bit the cyan color channel of the scanned positive to make the white look more natural. Shadows still tend to have some blueish cast which reminds me on Kodak Ektar 100 color negative film which does the same. On the other hand, the red turned out darker than expected. The top of the lighthouse tower has a red metal casing which looks black in the positive; also the red in the flag didn't look natural. I increased the saturation of the red channel to compensate - indeed all frames needed to be pushed a bit in saturation for the red color channel. The film reveals some grain if focused closer, but it remains invisible for websize postings. But seeing it already quite well in an enlarged 120 film size, I wonder how worse it would get in the small film format - I suspect it would be too grainy for my taste there. 

For the second frame, I chose a motive which contained high contrast elements as dark ones behind the staircase, brighter sky on top, and a yellowish tinted wall of the building with wooden stairs in shadow and in the sun on both sides. I know that the dynamic range of slide film is much more limited to negative film, but I wasn't sure how the Ektachrome 400 film would handle it. Similar to the first frame of the lighthouse, I had to decrease saturation of cyan to make the stairs look more grey and increase a bit the saturation of the yellow channel. I left the blue channel unchanged since the sky again turned out perfectly. I personally like the blueish cast within the window glasses, and the bit of blue in the shadow on the left. There is no detail in the dark areas behind - I got the first clue here that maybe a slight overexposure of the film could have been useful. Later frames proved this suspicion. 

The third frame was predominantly a test how fairly bright (and fairly colorless) sky would turn out. Again I exposed the scene for ISO 400 but had to push the midtones a bit before the final scan after previewing the scanned image. Yellow/orange colors had to be saturated a bit more avoiding that some reddish color cast gets into the brighter elements of the otherwise - again - perfectly lit and colored sky. I could/should have used a graduated ND filter for this scene, but the plastic graduated ND filters which I use often create a magenta color cast which is no issue to remove in a digital photo but certainly is an issue for a film based photo! Since I wanted to see in this trial how the colors turn out on the film itself, I didn't even try to use the filters. As bonus some geese just flew into my photo when i pressed the shutter release button - since I didn't use a filter and therefore used quite a fast exposure time of 1/250s, they showed up very sharp close to the left border. 

Time to test the film sensitivity of other colors! Some of the decaying structures use green paint - I decided to take a frame with the 80/2.8 lens closer focused in to blur out the background with f/8 and my circular 2-stop glass ND filter. The film revealed a less good sensitivity for greens - they show up in a more blueish look fitting to the dominant color sensitivity of this Ektachrome film. Even seeing the trade-off in the greens, I like that the bright sky in the background still shows some blue in it. Other than increasing again the saturation for yellow as in the frames above and increasing the midtone exposure, I had no other post processing to do here. 

The last frame shown here as example is from a wall drawing which I detected on my drive to Sandy Hook. The blue/yellow/orange colors lit by the sun from the back were the perfect test subject for the Ektachrome 400. Consequently, again the blue dominated the frame followed by the yellow as second. The shadow caused by the overhang has a blueish cast, too. 

Overall, a very unique film which doesn't compare easily to any other Fuji slide films I have used earlier! I can't fully exclude that some of the color gamut deviations are partially caused by my own E-6 development, but so far I developed a bunch of other Fuji slide films very well which had a different look than the Ektachrome film. A quick summary of my pros and cons of this film:

PROS:

• Rich in blues, brings out sky rich in color without using additional filters 
• Very rich and contrasty look
• High resolution for this mid ISO range film
• Best use for landscape/scenery photography, also architecture

CONS:

• Less sensitive for green, yellow/orange needs to be pushed a bit
• White has a cyan tint in it (can be removed easily in PP)
• Visible grain when zoomed in (not an issue for the 120 film format though but likely for 35 mm film)
• Wouldn't use it as my first choice for portraits