Which Brand Of Film Has The Best Quality?
In choosing a film, you have to decide what type, speed, and roll length you want. But you also have to make one more decision: which brand to buy. Film manufacturers compete aggressively, and the results have been very, very good for photography - to the extent that truly bad films are few and far between.
In fact, film manufacturers hold endless focus groups to figure out what their customers look for in a film. Those qualities seem obvious enough. People want their pictures to be sharp, brightly colored, as detailed as possible, and to have realistic skin tones. Getting all those features in a single film is not easy, but current color print films - especially the fast ISO 400 and ISO 800 films - come pretty darn close.
In the past, different manufacturers' film tended to have different personalities - to render color and detail in visually distinctive ways. Modern film technology has minimized those differences, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Those differences in color and detail are more evident in slide films than color print films, but it's still worth experimenting with various brands of print film to see whether one in particular gives you results that are more to your taste. For most purposes, you'll probably find little visible difference in sharpness or graininess between one maker's film of a particular speed and type and another's. Where you may see subtle differences, however, is in the films' contrast or color saturation.
What is contrast?
Contrast refers to the tonal scale of a photographic image - specifically, the difference between light and dark values. That difference is easier to discern in black and white than in color, though you may see it especially in the ability of a film to render textures. But color saturation - the overall intensity with which a film renders color - is another story. Some films appear to produce redder reds, greener greens, and bluer blues than other films and are said to have higher color saturation. It sounds great, but higher saturation can come at the expense of a loss of texture and detail in brightly colored areas, and it may even cause an unattractive ruddiness in skin tones. Color saturation, the sense of texture, and the fidelity of skin tones are important qualities to evaluate in your pictures. Because they're more variable than graininess and sharpness, they're really more important.
How do I know what brands work best for me?
Simple: Buy two short (12-exposure for 35mm, 15-exposure for APS) rolls of ISO 400 print film, each a different brand. Load one and do your usual all-around shooting, saving the last few frames. For those frames, choose a subject that has a variety of colors, tones, and textures. If you like, choose two subjects close by - one for a shot with flash, one for without. (Throw in a person for some skin tones.) Shoot the subject(s) with the last few frames of the roll.
Immediately load the other roll and shoot the same subject(s). You can even put a card in each shot with the film brand written on it, so you don't have to look at negative strips to get that information. Have your usual photo-finisher process and print both rolls, and then compare the prints from each. Do you like one better than the other? If so, then stick with that brand - but just to be fair, periodically shoot another brand to confirm your preference!
What about Premium films?
If you buy your film at photo shops rather than in drugstores and supermarkets, you may have noticed that the big-brand films sometimes come in premium versions. Kodak has Royal Gold film in addition to its standard Gold line, for instance. Available in more or less the same choice of speeds as the standard line, premium films are often marketed as special-purpose or special-occasion films - films for once-in-a-lifetime sorts of pictures. Suspicious consumers may dismiss premium film as a marketing scam, but it really isn't. Real differences exist between a given maker's premium and standard films. The question, as usual, is whether you can see those differences.
