Fujifilm 200 Color Negative vs. Kodak Gold

Fujifilm 200 is a US-made colour-negative film with Fujifilm branding sold across many outlets, including my local drugstore. This film is the current successor to the Japanese-made Fujicolor C 200, a medium-speed, affordable colour-negative film.

In this article, I’ll compare and review both films.

I shot both films in Nikon FM2 and Nikon FE with Nikon AI-S Nikkor 50mm 𝒇1.8 lenses. They were developed at home in the Flic Film C-41 kit and scanned with film Q for full manual control over colour corrections.

In this article: A Fujifilm-branded Kodak film? Guess! Experiment overview and methods. Answer key. Side-by-side: reference cards under studio light. Side-by-side: exposure tests. Side-by-side: portraits in studio light. Price differences. Which film is the best? Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

Thank you, Lily Li Hua (Instagram: @lilianlihua), for modelling!

A Fujifilm-branded Kodak film?

Fujifilm and Kodak have been fierce competitors since the Japanese brand entered the global consumer film market in 1984 as a headlining sponsor of the Olympics held in Los Angeles.

Kodak was the first to produce flexible photographic film in 1889 — 136 years ago, 63 years after the first photograph was taken. The company rose to prominent dominance thanks to its revolutionary product, and it retains its superiority in the market today. But they’ve never remained unchallenged, as even during the downfall of analogue cameras in the early 2000s, there were still Ilford, Fujifilm, and others who made film for our cameras.

Fujifilm has been making emulsions since the 1930s, but they only began competing with Kodak directly in the 1980s in the US and European markets. Alas, the Japanese company (though it still makes instant, slide, and black-and-white film) exited the colour-negative film space in 2023 when it discontinued Superia X-Tra.

The same year Fujifilm stopped producing colour-negative film, new Fujifilm-branded boxes began appearing on store shelves around the world. But those films were clearly labelled as “Made in the USA.”

Fujifilm operates a paper coating plant in the US; however, it’s unlikely that they could retool it to produce photographic film in a short time. While the company does not publish its procurement and distribution sources, many assume that today’s colour-negative film from Fujifilm is repackaged Kodak emulsions.

Indeed, I would expect to see more visual differences between the results from emulsions produced in different parts of the world than what you can see in the examples in this article. Fujifilm 200 is remarkably close to Kodak Gold. In my previous post, I demonstrated easy-to-notice distinctions between other non-Kodak colour films, and I even found some slight differences between two ISO 200 consumer Kodak colour films: Gold vs. ColorPlus.

Today, we’ll find out how much of a difference there is between the original Kodak Gold and its suspected rebrand, Fujifilm 200.

Guess!

Rebranding and respooling are often misunderstood in photography. Not only is there a process of distribution, pricing, packaging, and design involved, but oftentimes the film can also be significantly modified or coated with slight differences. For example, Lomography Color Negative 800 delivers more contrast and higher-saturation reds when compared to Kodak Portra 800, whereas Flic Film Aurora 800 looks like neither upon closer examination.

Thus, even if Kodak does produce the “new” Fujifilm 200 emulsions, they may not be the exact same film. And that’s what we’ll confirm or refute in this article.

But could you tell which is which just by examining the photos above?

The answer key is below the fold.

Experiment overview and methods.

Even in ideal conditions, various scanning software can alter the colours and even the appearance of grain frame-to-frame, making the act of comparing films challenging and fraught with bias.

Instead of relying on a black box that is film inversion apps, I used film Q, which uses an open and predictable standard: histogram stretching. This method does not involve automatic colour correction, sharpening, or saturation adjustments; it simply inverts the image and optimizes individual colour channels using a simple, deterministic algorithm.

Histogram stretching is the cleanest and simplest method to invert film negatives without altering the underlying colours. But, of course, there would still be differences if any edits are applied on top (which is why I clearly label any changes in this article other than light cropping).

All scans in this article are made with Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 5000ED and VueScan (set to neutral/positive, leaving inversion up to film Q). All the film was developed at home in the same Paterson tank. These photos were taken on my Nikon F2 and Nikon FM2n with 50mm Nikkor 1.8 lenses. Indoor lighting was cast using my Amaran F21x panel set to 5500K (daylight).

I also doubled up my exposures, asking Lily to keep her pose as still as possible while I took two frames on each film for each pose/exposure settings. Needless to say, a lot of materials and effort went into this project.