30 Year old Ektachrome Elite 100 – will it still work? How about with cross-processing?

One of the side benefits of collecting and repairing old cameras is sometimes finding a very old film with a camera. Recently I acquired an unused roll of 35mm Kodak Ektachrome Elite 100 with a job lot I purchased. It had expired in 1995 and I had no idea how it had been stored, but thought it worth trying. Another complication was I did not have any E6 processing capability and didn’t want to spend money on sending it to a lab for potentially no result. However I have been processing C41 with a Cinestill Cs41 kit so thought cross-processing might be interesting and there was really not a lot to lose.

I loaded the film into a Konica C35, a camera I use a bit because it is simple, reliable and has a very good lens, and shot it over a few days. An often-used rule of thumb for setting ISO on old film is 1 stop per decade which would have been 12. This wasn’t going to be very practical, so I stayed with the box speed.

The Cs41 kit I had was almost at the end of its life so this would be the last film through that particular brew. Not having any idea of how much to compensate, decided to simply increase the development time by 50%. I used a Canon 9000F to scan the images, exactly as I would for other C41 negatives.

The result was better than I expected; high contrast but with accurate colours. In areas of uniform colour such as the sky there is a grainy blotchy effect, perhaps a sign of film deterioration? Otherwise the images look ok. Not bad for a hit and miss approach, maybe I was just lucky! But I think it does show the resilience of good film.

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