Harman 🐦‍🔥 Phoenix Film Review

Harman Phoenix 200 I & II are the first colour-negative films to come from the UK’s famously black-and-white film factory (better known as Ilford by packaging).

Ilford only made colour film once before, in the 1960s. However, that was a relatively short-lived product for a company that’s been in business since 1879. Instead of relying on the remnants of a sixty-year-old IP, Harman (the company behind Ilford products) used one of their existing black-and-white film products: XP2.

Ilford XP2 Super 400 was made for colour-negative development chemicals, and it’s the only film of its kind that remains. Made for labs that don’t accept black-and-white and scanners with Digital ICE dust & scratch removal, it can be modified to work as colour film while also remaining compatible with colour-negative film development chemicals (the C-41 process).

Modifying black-and-white film chemicals, as well as the production line that still has to work for the rest of Ilford’s products, isn’t easy or cheap. Harman Phoenix is undoubtedly possible thanks to the company’s recent R&D investments in response to the growing global interest in film photography.

Phoenix is not a perfect film. The modified black-and-white emulsion renders colourful, grainy photos that still can’t match even the cheaper Kodak films in resolution or colour accuracy. Yet the film photography community enthusiastically embraced this new experimental emulsion. Harman became the world’s fifth colour-negative film manufacturer on December 1, 2023.

Since launch, the company has created several versions of its film and encouraged its customers to experiment — and so we did.

In this review, I’ll share samples, discuss technical and creative aspects of shooting with Harman Phoenix films (there are several!), cover numerous experiments, such as bleach bypass, C41-reversal (developing as slide), and compare it to other new films, like Ilford Ilfocolor 400 (which is something completely different!).

In this review: The many Phoenix film variants. Dynamic range and contrast. Harman Phoenix colours. Halations. Grain, resolution, sharpness. Developing Harman Phoenix 200 as a slide film. Bleach bypass. Scanning Phoenix 200. Harman Phoenix II vs. ORWO NC200. Harman Phoenix price and availability. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

A big thank-you to Lily Li Hua for modelling. Find and follow her on Instagram: @lilianlihua.

The many Phoenix film variants.

There are currently Harman Phoenix I and Harman Phoenix II, each released a year apart. There’s also Harman Red and Ilford Ilfocolor (the latter is something entirely different).

Phoenix I is the company’s first modern attempt at colour-negative film. It comes in orange packaging. This variant may be the community favourite thanks to its relatively clear base — useful for creating positives — and it appears to have a more natural colour palette than the upgrade.

Harman said they add incremental changes to all of their Phoenix batches, so you may get slightly different results depending on when you get it. But the major upgrade came with the II:

Phoenix II is the factory’s next-generation colour-negative film. It has numerous tweaks to colours, dynamic range, and granularity. Phoenix II comes in a blue box. Unfortunately, this film cannot be reversal-processed as well as Phoenix I (so, no positives). The biggest difference, when processed normally, is in the way Phoenix II renders reds and oranges: they are harder to tell apart.

Notice how, in the photos below, Phoenix II (left) shows less noticeable difference between yellow and red colours (middle-left of the chart) than its German competitor (ORWO NC200). The ORWO film matches the real-world more accurately:

I’ve also noticed that I had to spend a little more time correcting the colours after scanning with Phoenix II than with Phoenix I. On the plus side, Phoenix II may be a little easier to shoot as it offers an extended dynamic range compared to the first release.

Still, despite those changes, Phoenix II, like Phoenix I, is still a worthy film to try. It’s absolutely unique: unlike most new brands that re-spool Kodak films and sell them in new packaging, Harman is making something no one else can — a new colour palette.

Speaking of rebrands, you may come across a familiar name on a box of colour film: Ilford Ilfocolor 400. However, this film is made by a completely different factory and has nothing to do with the Phoenix project.

The original Ilford brand was split up by a bankruptcy in 2004. The company that actually makes the film in the UK became Harman, but its Swiss arm retained the name Ilford. Today, Harman is renting the Ilford name from the Swiss to place on their black-and-white film packaging.

However, Harman’s licensing rights to Ilford do not extend to colour film products (hence Harman Phoenix, not Ilford Phoenix). Meanwhile, the Swiss brand — which notably does not make any film in-house — is most likely respooling the German ORWO NC400.

NC400 is a very different film from Phoenix. I’ve compared both films in this article: “Harman Phoenix 200 vs. Ilford Ilfocolor 400.”

Phoenix Red 125 is a redscaled version of the Phoenix films — a project you can try with any colour film at home quite easily, though the factory could do a better job of packaging it.

Lastly, Harman Switch Azure 125 is a film with a shuffled layer order to create striking false-colour images in a pretty teal-coloured box.

Dynamic range and contrast.

Dynamic range is one of the key properties of photographic film. It explains a film’s contrast profile and how easy or difficult it would be to capture a scene on the emulsion in question. A smaller number implies higher contrast and greater difficulties capturing details in shadows/highlights. Dynamic range can be ascertained from film characteristic curves, which provide additional context, such as latitude (i.e., how quickly the details will disappear in shadows/highlights).

Based on the graph in Harman’s datasheet, Phoenix I appears to have around 1.5 lux-seconds (log exposure) of useful density variation. This converts to about five stops of dynamic range. Phoenix II is an upgrade to 1.5 lux-seconds — about six stops.

To put this into context, DR of 5 is comparable to high-contrast slide films like Velvia 50 and Ektachrome E100. These films can be difficult to shoot, as certain scenes can appear both overexposed and underexposed at the same time (when they include dark shadows and bright highlights). However, in film photography, low dynamic range is also associated with high contrast that can be a desirable property in its own right.

The dynamic range is a trade-off: higher contrast vs. ease of exposure.

High-contrast/low-dynamic-range films are typically high-resolution, low-ISO. This is not the case for Phoenix, as it’s relatively grainy (as you will also see in the close-ups below). While this property certainly gives a unique look to Harman’s colour products, the company is also actively working on improving their film’s ability to retain details in shadows and highlights. This is evident from their technical documentation and promotional materials, which boast improvements to DR in their Phoenix II film.

However, Phoenix II is still a high-contrast film that should be used with care unless you like not seeing what’s in the shadows. The real advantage of the upgraded version, as I found after shooting and scanning a few rolls, is the amount of noise visible in the shadows. For example, the above photo, shot on Phoenix I, shows very little information in the shadows — less than the original scan had. That’s because it had a lot of green noise, which I had to remove by making the shadows even darker. The upgraded version, on the other hand, seems a little easier to expose and needs no clean-up after scanning:

Harman Phoenix colours.

Both Phoenix I and Phoenix II render vivid, highly saturated colours with limited accuracy.

Phoenix I had some limits to how well it could render the greens, particularly the foliage (it may be hard to differentiate hues, especially in slightly overexposed areas), whereas the new Phoenix II appears incapable of rendering the deep red colour. The II also tends to saturate the blue colours, especially deep blue, very strongly.

That said, both Harman Phoenix I & II offer some of the brightest, most saturated colours on film without any adjustments after scanning.

To get the images in this article, I scanned my negatives with Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 5000ED and inverted them with film Q, an app that makes no adjustments during the process. Several photos here needed some colour correction, which I made using a greyscale reference mask.

Halations.

Another special property of the Harman Phoenix films is the halation effect.

Halation appears as red or orange halos around particularly bright highlights in the image. It’s caused by rays going through the film layers and then bouncing back to be reabsorbed by the emulsion’s red colour layer. Halation can also make your bright skies and surfaces appear a little redder than the rest of the image.

Most modern colour and black-and-white films counter halation with various anti-halation solutions. For example, Kodak motion picture films use remjet, while many others use integrated chemistry that washes off during development with water.

Harman Phoenix I & II films render some of the strongest halation effects on film, which may or may not be exactly what you want from your images. However you put it, it’s certainly unique:

Grain, resolution, sharpness.

Harman doesn’t share PGI or RMS values (the scientific measurements of film granularity). But if you’re reading this on a large screen or zooming in on the images, you should notice that it’s fairly chunky. In fact, Phoenix 200 grain is perhaps the coarsest out of all the new ISO200 colour emulsions on the market.

This film is based on Ilford XP2 Super black-and-white film, designed for development in C-41 chemicals. XP2’s grain is already fairly noticeable. It’s possible that adding colour layers to the film made that even more apparent.

Phoenix II is promised to have finer grain, although it’s still quite chunky — even in the highlights. While large, the grain is very sharp when developed in C-41. This can add definition and legibility to your photos.

All Phoenix films are available in 35mm and 120 formats; if you don’t like grain, try shooting a larger format or developing as a slide — maybe both!

The image above compares Phoenix II (left) with ORWO NC 200 (right). While the ORWO film is still relatively grainy, it can become smoother in the highlights — notice the lips — whereas Phoenix shows a similar grain size throughout the image. Meanwhile, films like Kodak Ektar 100 will not show visible grain at this magnification level.

Developing Harman Phoenix 200 as a slide film.

Harman Phoenix I uses a clear base for the emulsion, which means it can be developed as a positive (slides) in E-6 chemicals. Another way to create slides with this film is to develop it in a hot black-and-white film developer, expose it to light, and then in C-41 chemistry again (a process also known as C-41 reversal).

 ☝︎ Further reading: “Harman Phoenix C-41 Reversal Process (Rodinal).”

My experiments revealed that, in certain light, exposure, and while using specific development methods, Phoenix I can render natural-looking high-contrast colours that need minimal correction and are easy to scan.

When developed as slide film, Phoenix 200 also showed a dramatic reduction in grain size.

Bleach bypass.

If you develop your film at home and use a kit with separate bleach and fixer, you can skip the bleach to tame the saturation and add inkiness to the shadows.

Given how contrasty, colourful, grainy, and extreme in several ways Harman Phoenix films are, experimental techniques such as bleach bypass may not even stand out from the typical development techniques. The colours and contrast I got from skipping that step practically match the standard C-41 process, which makes me wonder if it’s worth simply skipping the bleach step for this film altogether to save a few minutes of development time.

Scanning Phoenix 200.

Harman Phoenix is not like other colour-negative films. Aside from simply being new, which means there are no existing profiles or presets on certain lab scanners, it also has a unique purple colour mask.

Most colour-negative films use an orange mask. The mask simplifies production for the manufacturer by countering chemical impurities. It is a standard way to encode analogue colour image information in a negative since the mid-20th century. Scanners and scanning software that were built around this technology may expect to see some shade of orange or cause issues with the final results.

Analog.Cafe’s own film inversion software, film Q (which does not alter the colours during the process and openly explains exactly what it does to the image), works well with Phoenix. Though you may need some colour corrections after the fact, it’s generally good to go out-of-the-box. Phoenix II, on the other hand, can often cause the colours to turn yellow, which should be corrected after scanning. Alternatively, you can try inverting your film negatives manually.

Harman knows that their film is hard to scan. Which is why they’ve included a lengthy section on scanning in their datasheets. These instructions differ between Phoenix 200 and Phoenix II. If you plan to have your scan at a lab, make sure you let them know about these recommendations.

Datasheet for Harman Phoenix I (with scanning instructions).

Datasheet for Harman Phoenix II (with scanning instructions).

Harman Phoenix II vs. ORWO NC200.

When Phoenix II was released, it was often compared against the ORWO NC200 film (better known as KONO Color 200 or OptiColour 200). At that time, those were the only two colour-negative films made independently of Kodak and Fujifilm (now joined by the Lucky colour films).

This article, “Comparing Two Newest Colour Films: Phoenix vs. NC200,” compares them side-by-side to see which of these formulas is closer to replacing Kodak’s legacy of innovation and excellence in colour photochemistry.

Harman Phoenix price and availability.

Harman Phoenix I & II currently sells between $12 and $22 per roll of 36exp. See the current market average price for this film here.

I’ve seen it being sold in the US, Canada, and the UK at popular and lesser-known shops. It shouldn’t be difficult for you to find yourself a roll, as Harman’s existing distribution for Ilford-branded films works very well for this film.

❤ By the way: Please consider making your Harman Phoenix 200 using this link  so that this website may get a small percentage of that sale — at no extra charge for you — thanks!