ADOX Colour Mission 200 – A new colour negative film – By Phil Harrison

For those of you who haven’t heard of this film I’ll start with Adox’s sales copy:

ADOX has released Color Mission – a film with delicately vibrant minty greens, peachy reds, airy grain and a purpose at the core. The name is intentional: those small 35mm rolls are on a big mission to give the analog community a beautiful product while investing into the future of film research and production, which is one of the most sophisticated challenges in the analog industry.

One batch of color film has been co-researched with and coated for ADOX by a company, which went bankrupt shortly after the first run. Now, ADOX is starting a fully independent R&D for color film, which requires significant investments. The ADOX chemical production is financing the research of new photochemistry. Now, time has come to release Color Mission – those films coated a few years ago, kept in the cool house until this moment, have kept extra well, and have not lost it’s original 200 ISO speed. All the sales profits from this product will be going specifically to film research – not chemistry, not paper emulsion – film. Realistically, a new film is not coming next year – in four years, perhaps. The supply of Color Mission will be enough for this time, and possibly a bit longer. What will the new film look like? Even with the recipes of a certain film, cloning it in another emulsion kettle is close to impossible. If our color mission succeeds, most likely it will have its own unique characteristics.

Fotoimpex in Germany own and export Adox films, chemistry and paper. Fotoimpex’s minimum order size is 170 EUR to the UK, due they say to Brexit. So buying a few rolls at the reasonable price of 12 EUR each wasn’t going to happen. A few UK sellers have imported the film and are selling it for quite a lot more money but, I thought, it’s a new colour film so why not try a few rolls. For the photography I used my M6 with Summarit-M 35mm f2.4 and a Jupiter-8 50mm f2 with immaculate glass. Rating the film at Adox’s speed of EI200.

This isn’t a serious review, more a chance to take photos in different lighting situations and get a general impression of the films abilities under the different lighting. To look at the colour in the various situations and of course the grain. I tend to expose for some detail in the shadows. I reckoned 2 rolls of Adox Colour Mission should be enough to get a reasonable impression of the film. Of course choice of film is a very personal thing but you will get an idea from my images what can be expected. I initially digitaly print my images to 5×7 to check for they look right then up to A4 or A3 for a few of the best, from high resolution scans. I believe you can’t see what a film is really like unless it’s printed, a monitor screen can never replace a print. I have only adjusted the scans for brightness where necessary, colour and contrast are as they came from the lab.

Here’s some images from my first roll taken in Todmorden on a dull day and in Rochdale on a sunny day. You can see the rich colour and quite high contrast.

My second roll was shot in Chester on a sunny day.

My thoughts are that this film is a good first coating run and a very useable film, but Adox hint strongly that when they have finished their mission and another new film arrives it may well be different to Mission 200. I think Mission 200 needs a bit of work, reducing contrast and a bit more definition would help,  I like the overall colour rendition very much, grain is quite fine.  In a market dominated by Kodak at the moment (who knows what’s happening at Fuji) it is nice to see a new colour film from an old and venerable manufacturer as Adox.

You’ve read what I think about the film, what do you think, I hope you enjoyed the article

Phil

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