Lucky C200 (乐凯) Film Review

Lucky C200 (乐凯 — pronounced Lè Kǎi) is a new colour-negative film from China. It’s characterized by occasional pink casts, bold, saturated colours, and an affordable price.

While this film isn’t yet widely available in the US (as of February 2026), it’s beginning to slowly make its way to the rest of the world.

Lucky C200 is made in the 135 and the 120. For this review, I’ve tested the 35mm variant, but if you shoot medium format, it may be a sensible choice for cleaner-looking images, as this film can get fairly grainy.

Only five factories in the world can make colour-negative film today, with Lucky being a recent addition. (The others are Eastman Kodak, Harman, Fujifilm, and ORWO). I love seeing more options for our cameras, yet it’s worth noting that the quality of the emulsion you’d get from each source differs noticeably.

Lucky C200 occupies a spot somewhere between experimental films, such as Harman Phoenix 200 (a totally new formulation with high contrast, low dynamic range, and unusual colours), and the classics, such as Kodak Gold 200 (a staple used by both amateurs and professionals). But when it comes to price, it’s one of the most affordable options.

The question is whether the results you’ll get with this film are worth the hassle of importing it or finding a retailer that sells it at a reasonable price (which should be no more than $12/roll in early 2026).

In this review, I’ll cover all the technical aspects of shooting this new film, including exposure, development, scanning, inversion, and colour correction. I will also share samples shot in numerous settings, as well as images captured with the famous “3D” film camera.

In this review: Colours. Contrast, dynamic range, and exposure tips. Grain, resolution, sharpness. Developing Lucky C200 at home. Scanning and editing. Where to buy. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

 ☝︎ Further reading: Learn more about this film and how it compares against the “industry standard” Kodak Gold in my earlier article, “Lucky C200 (乐凯) vs. Kodak Gold.”

Colours.

Lucky C200 tends to produce saturated reds and greens with somewhat subdued blue tones, provided you scan and correct the colours to comply with a reference greyscale mask.

In direct sunlight, this film works very well with foliage, as its greens are both saturated and reasonably detailed. Unlike the current Harman Phoenix films and the earlier ORWO NC 500, there’s a lot of colour variation that renders plants in a wide spectrum of hues. It works particularly well if there are significant red or brown details in your shot.

The downside of the warm, detailed, well-saturated greens and reds is their oversized influence on the scene’s neutral colours.

Another unique quality of this film is its rendering of the blue tones. They are subdued (light, low saturation), but you may also notice them bleed into neutral colours. Practically speaking, this means that overcast and cool lighting, as well as underexposure, can make your photos look especially dull.

That said, Lucky C200 can produce realistic images, including detailed portraits and shots made in complex or mixed light. I think this film has the potential to be a decent everyday stock, as long as you’re aware of how it interacts with the world and how to correct its mistakes.

Because Lucky C200 receives and renders light so much differently than any traditional film stock sold today, your best bet for achieving your ideal results is to shoot a practice roll in varied settings and consider the scanning/editing techniques covered below.

Or use a cheat code: shoot warm colours in warm light!

Contrast, dynamic range, and exposure tips.

There were no new colour film formulations for over a decade after the photochemical industry’s collapse, as the world switched from analogue to digital cameras in the early 2000s and 2010s. Lucky for us, new emulsions began appearing in the early 2020s (the first being Lomochrome Metropolis). Unfortunately, new colour films aren’t as capable as the established Kodak and Fujifilm standards in dynamic range and colour management.

Like those new films, Lucky C200 is still behind Kodak when it comes to dynamic range (contrast management), at least according to what I saw in my results. Though it can be as good as Kodak Gold (in many cases) at capturing portraits and foliage.

Dynamic range measures how well a film can handle high-contrast scenes.

For example, the attached animated image of a street vendor has hot spots where the food containers appear white, with very few visible details, and cold spots where the guy’s hoodie is so dark we can’t see any folds in the clothing. Lucky C200 struggles to capture those elements, whereas films like Kodak Portra 800 have no problem preserving the information across all brightness levels, and even leave a spare room for edits (i.e., should you like to increase the contrast further after scanning the film). Portra 800 has a wider dynamic range than C200.

Lucky film’s relatively narrow dynamic range can make it more challenging to shoot than some of the options you may be used to. Because of that, I recommend you be mindful of the brightness range in your scenes. Situations like the one above, where there’s a deep shadow and extremely bright highlights, can lose detail in both of those extremes, even if you meter your film perfectly. Still, I wouldn’t shy away from taking photos in bright sunlight — just watch for the extremes and avoid having the most important parts of the image in those fringes.

Grain, resolution, sharpness.

As a new film, Lucky C200 is also grainier than Kodak’s ISO 200 films (which include Kodak ColorPlus/Kodacolor 200, and Kodak Gold). Yet it appears to still be smoother than the new ORWO 200 and the Harman Phoenix films.

But I’ve also noticed another strange thing about this film: the blues are less grainy than the greens and reds, somehow.

Most advanced colour-negative and black-and-white films use different grain sizes for different brightness levels. Larger grains can catch more photons, which is why they are useful in the shadows. Smaller grains are finer but require more light. But a mixture of both creates an image that captures details across a wide range of exposures and is fine-grained. For Lucky, it seems that the granules responsible for capturing blue light are both less sensitive and finer than the other colours.

Developing Lucky C200 at home.

Being a C-41 film, Lucky C200 uses a standard process and is very easy to develop at home. However, there are a couple of things I think you should be aware of:

In my case, the spool that holds the film inside the 135 canister isn’t particularly firm, which means it may accidentally rip as you load the last few frames into your Paterson tank. This is not a significant issue (since the film is loaded in a dark bag) — unless you are hoping to save that canister for bulk loading.

Lucky C200 had also come out of the tank looking milky-white for me, which felt concerning for the first few minutes, until it dried into a relatively normal-looking orange mask. Here’s what yours should look like:

Scanning and editing.

Lucky C200 dries flat, making it easy to physically handle and scan.

The film uses an orange mask, which should work decently well with most scanning setups — although that’s hard to predict. I used my Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 5000ED with VueScan to create digital negatives, which I inverted using film Q.

Most scans needed no adjustments. However, slight underexposures or in cases where light is too cool for this film required adjustments. I used Photoshop (but you can use any tool) to warm up the highlights, remove reds from the mid-tones, and clean up green from the shadows.

Where to buy.

Several shops around the world sell this film today. Please note that your proximity to China does not guarantee that it’ll be available. For example, you can’t find it in Taiwan. However, a few rolls are floating on eBay, which you can check using the link below:

❤ Please consider making your Lucky C200 film purchase using this link  so that this website may get a small percentage of that sale — at no extra charge for you — thanks!