Lucky C200 vs Colorplus vs Phoenix II

Despite being talked about a lot, there has not been much review about Lucky’s new color negative C200 in the western part of the world since its launch in July in China. I recently got my hands on this film and did a quick test comparing it with Phoenix II, which launched just one day earlier. I compared it to Kodak Colorplus as well. Current price of Lucky is ￥59 (around US$8.2) inclusive of development/scan and 6inch print out.

I shot Lucky #1 and Phoenix with Contax G1+G45, Lucky #2 and Colorplus with Canon EOS7+EF35. All shots were developed at home, Lucky #1 and Phoenix II in the same tank, Lucky #2 and Colorplus in the same tank. I scanned with Canon R6 and converted by NLP. There were definitely some user process factors affecting the end result, but I did try my best to keep the result consistent.
Here are the side-by-side test shots.

Lucky vs Phoenix II:

To my eyes, Lucky C200 is distinctively better. Phoenix II is a lot grainier, has less latitude, and highlight halation is worse. Lucky has quite fine grain structure, color is muted, but nostalgic. It does suffer from quality issues, including lots of blue/grey dots and banding, which is due to hand coating in the first batch. This is supposed to be corrected in the future runs.

Lucky vs Colorplus, here is where the serious battle begins:

Color: IMHO Kodak still has the edge in terms of color fidelity. Lucky is leaning to the coolish side of the spectrum, as well as pronounced magenta, especially the skin tone is a bit off. But others may have a different opinion.

Latitude, grain, resolution: I do not see a distinctive difference between these two, which is a good sign for Lucky.

In recent decades, apart from Kodak, other film manufacturers have not come up with a good quality yet reasonably priced color negative film. ORWO NC400/500 is grainy and more for lomo style. Phoenix still has a long way to go. Adox color mission looks like a prematurely terminated mission. And Fuji is also Kodak now. Enter Lucky: If they manage to get rid of the quality issues, and bring down the price to under ￥50 (US$7), I guess we would finally have a serious contender against Kodak for everyday film in the community.

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