I bought several rolls of Ektar 100 about a month and a half ago and just got the first roll developed. I would have posted something sooner, but there has been NO LIGHT for photography in the dreary winter at my latitude.
All of the below were taken with my Ricoh XR7, the taking lenses are listed with the photo. All photos were handheld with no particular care taken in regards to critical focus. Sadly, I neglected to take any with skin tones. The film was processed at Costco using their standard service ($1.59 USD). I also had them scan the negatives to JPEG using the Noritsu Koki QSS with an image resolution of 3087x2048 pixels (an additional $2.99...Whooo Hooo...). The scans were done using the default "auto" settings.
Post-processing was limited to minor adjustments to exposure/brightness/contrast with no sharpening, noise reduction, or changes to saturation applied.
#1 LZOS Jupiter-9 85/2 #2 LZOS Jupiter-9 85/2 #3 Pentax-M 50/1.7 #4 Pentax-M 50/1.7 #5 LZOS Jupiter-9 85/2 100% Crop of image #2 to show grain size/pattern This is about as grainy as it gets with this film. My Impressions:
I am pretty pleased with the results. Colors are vibrant and true with great saturation and smooth gradation. Ektar 100 appears to have grain size and structure comparable to TMax 100. Typical of color negative film, Ektar 100 has wide exposure latitude with plenty of headroom in the highlights and retention of shadow detail. A more careful custom scan at a professional lab may provide better results, but I will save that sort of thing for a later date. I am kicking myself for not forcing family members or co-workers to model for a skin tone test. Next time, I guess.
Steve
(Begging forgiveness for posting shots from a non-Pentax body mounted with a non-Pentax lens...)
Last edited by stevebrot; 12-31-2008 at 10:28 PM.