Friday, November 29, 2013

Rollei Digibase 200



Back in the days of Kodachrome I really loved slide film. There was nothing more beautiful than the bright and totally saturated colors of Kodachrome projected up onto a screen that made the images look as big or bigger than life. Well, Kodachrome is gone for good but the experience shooting with sharp supersaturated color transparency film is not.

Rollei Digibase 200 is no Kodachrome but it is a very nice film to work with. Similar in many respects to Fujichrome Velvia 100 but a full stop faster, this slide film has a warm color palette and with it’s clear base seems to have been designed for scanning. I can’t say that I prefer this film to Velvia but with Kodak out of the slide film business altogether it is good to have another choice besides the Fuji.

The photograph above was taken with a 50mm lens set at f11 and 1/125 using the Pentax ZX-7. This was on an outing that designed primarily to shoot a roll of Portra 400 in my new (to me) Kodak Vigilant 620 folder. I used the ZX-7’s meter to check up on my cell phone light meter app and make sure I was using the correct exposure on the old Kodak and I shot a few of the same compositions with both cameras for comparison. The quality of the ZX-7’s images was clearly superior because of the better optics but the Kodak’s were actually more impressive for having come from a 70 year old camera.



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