In my last post I talked about my experiences of using the Kodak Ektar H35N “toy” half-frame camera for the first time. Since then, for most of the Spring and Summer of this year, I have had the camera loaded with the brand new experimental colour film from Harman (Ilford), called Phoenix. This weekend I finally finished the film and had it processed, so I thought I’d share the results…

I scanned these on my Epson V550 as usual, and was quite pleased with the results, which didn’t need too much tweaking at all. Whilst there’s not too much grain, the images are pretty soft. This isn’t a issue with the camera, as the Kentmere 400 I used with it last time seemed to produce much sharper images.

The colours veer towards the oranges and reds, though the greens are strong too. Some other reviews of Phoenix have found it overly contrasty and saturated, though with my scans I appear to have avoided this.

What I did find however, is that the film – officially rated at ISO 200 – did not cope well with over or under exposure. This was rather unfortunate as the H35N really doesn’t have any exposure control, so out of the 72 images in the set, many suffered from having too much or too little light.

These three for example, all taken in daylight, were all very much underexposed with everything in the shade looking very muddy.

Whereas these bright and sunny beach scenes are decidedly over-cooked. I did rescan them individually, rather than as part of the strip, to get more bespoke results, and whilst I did manage to eke out a bit more detail, they did end up looking contrasty and saturated.

So in summary, the film is nice, but given it’s softness I would probably only use it in a full frame 35mm camera in future, and with a camera that also allows proper exposure control at that! It’s great that Harman are innovating and bringing brand new colour films to the market, and it will be interesting to see how Phoenix develops in the future.