Film Photography News — October 2025 Recap

☞ This is the 79th monthly Analog.Cafe Newsletter with the latest film photography lore. Sign up to get it via email on the last Tuesday of every month (it’s free).

The biggest stories in the world of film photography this October are the new Kodak films and a brand-new point-and-shoot camera from Lomography. But of course, there’s a whole lot more — from another new colour film (from Lomography) to a gold-plated (?) WideluxX prototype and several more outstanding community projects.

This free & ad-free newsletter is supported by the GOLD members. Memberships include access to more articles, like “How to Edit Film Scans” and “Pushing Ilford HP5+ to ISO 100,000”, and apps like film Q for inverting film negatives online. This month, I’ve added a practical guide for making pinhole cameras, from a five-minute project to multi-month adventures.

🎁 Try GOLD free for 14 days — You may even win free film!

In this newsletter: Free film. Kodak Kodacolor? What’s that? A podcast about the business side of Kodak. Lomo MC-A. Lomochrome Classicolor 200. WideluxX. Jagglé daylight development cassettes. Fixing expired film scans. Lucky 200 film availability. Upcoming film products and projects. I made a film camera out of a pumpkin and had it take a haunted “selfie.” 🎃 Latest on Analog.Cafe. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

Free film.

I’ve been giving away film to GOLD members at the end of each month all summer and fall. This is the October giveaway announcement. Two more left and then I’m out!

The winner of the triple-pack hand-wound black-and-white film (made by Ilford), Cinema Shorts BW 200 and Cinema Shorts BW 3200 is:

🎈Michael, 🎈

Congratulations! You won three rolls of free Cinema Shorts film. I’ve sent you an email with the next steps.

The next winner will be announced in the coming month. Learn more.

If that’s not you, but you’d still like to try the film and support the blog, it’s available at the shop (with optional lab services).

I only have a few rolls of this film. The film is packed in upcycled metal cartridges and plastic canisters, with a short, home-printed brochure, in 100% plastic-free padding and a recycled-paper cardboard box.

TL;DR: Kodak re-released some of its existing films as Kodacolor 100 & Kodacolor 200 (same as ColorPlus 200). Though not new products, these films should be a better deal for film photographers.

Kodak Kodacolor? What’s that?

Kodak used to be huge. But once most of us switched to using digital cameras around the 2010s, the business shrank. Kodak was too big to fail; still, the significantly diminished market made the company much smaller. In fact, most of its income now comes from supplying commercial printers.

Film still accounts for only a minor part of Kodak’s overall income pie, but the company is investing in it.

Factory upgrades are very important for various reasons. Kodacolor, however, represents a different kind of investment. It is a sign that Kodak is taking charge of its distribution, leading to potentially lower film prices in the near future.

How could this happen in a world where everything seems to get more expensive? The relief would be in the form of no longer having to pay the Alaris tax: let me explain.

Kodak Alaris is a piece of Kodak that broke off after the 2012 bankruptcy. For the past 13 years, they have been a separate business from Eastman Kodak Company.

Eastman Kodak Company is what everyone thinks of when we say Kodak. It’s the business that owns the factory in Rochester, New York, which makes the film.

Despite being separate from the factory, Alaris retained distribution rights to Kodak film. This means that once the Kodak-branded film exits the factory floor in Rochester, Alaris takes over marketing and distribution as a third-party partner.

But starting this month, Eastman Kodak will begin distributing some of its film without involving a third-party (Alaris).

Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 100 are the two films that are distributed directly by Eastman Kodak Company. I expect that eliminating a third party would reduce the prices of those two films compared to their existing equivalents.

So what are those equivalents? I have yet to test the “Kodacolor 100 is Pro Image 100” theory, but I am confident that Kodacolor 200 is the same film as ColorPlus 200 (see my test results and read about how I design my film comparison tests).

A podcast about the business side of Kodak.

If you’d like to learn more about how Kodak operates, and ultimately, how well it is doing as a business, check out this month’s Analog.Cafe Podcast episode. Daren and I discuss how the latest moves by the most important colour film manufacturer may both endanger its future operations and offer new opportunities for growth.

Lomo MC-A.

Lomography made a big announcement this month by opening preorders for its first compact autofocus 35mm film camera with a 32mm 𝒇2.8 multi-coated glass lens and lots of creative features, like the DX code auto/manual selector, lens filter thread, and a full manual mode.

Lomo MC-A uses metal parts for its shell. It uses a manual film winder/rewinder. It uses a LiDAR-assisted autofocus and a USB-C-rechargeable battery you can swap yourself.

MC-A isn’t cheap ($549 on pre-sale), yet it’s the company’s most advanced compact camera — an “LC-A on steroids,” as @fotomikko said it best on Threads.

Other notable features are the 1/500s top shutter speed, flash gel frame, unlimited autoexposures, and two trims:

Lomo MC-A in Black & Lomo MC-A in Silver (click the links for the respective pre-order pages). Lomography expects the cameras to ship in December 2025.

For sample photos taken with this camera, additional technical info and a short discussion, see this #editorial🔥 announcement and thread about the new Lomography camera.

Lomochrome Classicolor 200.

Lomography had also announced a new colour-negative film, their first ISO 200 option: Lomochrome Classicolor 200.

The film is available for pre-order today for $11.90 in 35mm/36exp. (est. shipping November 2025).

120 and 110 formats expected to come next!

Looking at the samples the company shared, you may recognize some of the signature hallmarks of the new ORWO NC 200 film (also known as KONO Color 200 and Optik Oldschool OptiColour 200). However, Lomography’s films are often a little different, even if they are made in factories we may recognize.

WideluxX.

Widelux was a phenomenal camera that captured true swing-panorama photos. It’s revered for its beautiful all-metal design, yet the tragic story behind its manufacturer and uniquely handmade craftsmanship make it both expensive and extremely difficult to fix.

Jeff Bridges swears by this camera for his creative work. In fact, the famous actor has recently decided to collaborate with a German film photography publication, Silvergran Classics, to restart manufacturing of the Widelux cameras. You can read more about this project in last month’s members’ newsletter, where I share what’s known and what I’ve learned after attending Charys Schuler’s talk in Vancouver. Charys is a co-owner of SilverBridges, the brand that’s building WideluxX — a modern remake of the vintage Widelux.

This month, SilverBridges announced that they have a prototype. The cameras are to be made with all-metal components, just like the original; first-ever copy features gold accents. The production models are likely to be made with more conventional colour choices — but you should expect the price for something like this to still be quite high.

Jagglé daylight development cassettes.

For large format shooters, Jagglé’s daylight development cassettes can help get the images faster. They work by being mounted directly on the body and then used as containers for chemicals during development. It’s quite brilliant.

The new Jagglé cassettes are compatible with 5×7 and 8×10 cameras.

Fixing expired film scans.

Expired film tends to show colour shifts and lose contrast over time. Though it’s perfectly fine to accept that, there’s an easy and quick way to restore most scans to their full glory with a simple computer vision technique called histogram stretching.

Alternatively, you can put all your scans through film Q, and it will automatically fix them in batches of up to 100 at a time. (Just go to Settings and select “Fix Base Fog.”)

Read this month’s new guide, “How to Fix Expired Slide Film Colours,” to learn how to use film Q or any advanced image editor of your choice to restore your expired film scans.

Lucky 200 film availability.

Lucky 200 is a new colour-negative film made in China at a factory that used to make Kodak products in the 2000s-2010s. The film was briefly available for sale at Reflx Lab for $10 per roll — unfortunately, it’s currently sold out. The good news is that this is not a limited run, and we should expect the stock to return shortly.

Upcoming film products and projects.

There’s a new dedicated 35mm film scanner, Knokke, in the works, made to rival the incredible but vintage Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN machines.

Reflex Lab, the same one that sells Lucky 200, is now offering a digital-to-film service. They would project your digital files onto Kodak motion picture film, develop it, and mail you physical slides. Pretty cool.

@lfyy spent two years designing and building a 6x7 technical camera with full perspective control movements that accepts Mamiya RB67 backs and large format lenses (47-135mm). This should be great for photographing architecture.

@-gingerninja made a large format camera that uses 99 lenses to take a single photo.

Reveni Labs is working on an autocollimator — a tool used to fine-tune rangefinders beyond rangefinder patch adjustments and inspect lenses. These tools are often hard to come by and quite expensive; it’s good to see a viable solution on the way. On this blog, I have an article that explains how you can use frosted tape and a cheap microscope for similar tasks — certainly jankier, but it does work.

I made a film camera out of a pumpkin and had it take a haunted “selfie.” 🎃

In my attempt to stoke the spirit of Halloween this year, I made a film camera at home that fits inside a pumpkin. I then placed it in front of a mirror with some candles and set a one-hour exposure with redscaled Harman Phoenix 200 film (which I’ve also pushed a stop).

The result: a scary-red cross-strip exposure you see above!

It took a day to carve a pumpkin and combine all my materials. But if you’d like to make a camera of your own, you can get the basics in just five minutes — or an hour if you’d like to make a 100% hand-made pinhole camera.

This month’s new guide, “How to Make a Pinhole Camera,” covers a few different levels of home camera making and all the sciency bits you’ll need to calculate your exposures.

Hope you found this email a helpful and fun read. Feel free to add a comment or reach out anytime. 👋