Testing Phoenix II
When Harman’s second iteration of the film came out there were a lot of reviews and articles that came out for people that got their hands on it. Except for a few, most reviews I found were mainly just going out and shooting the rolls on a walk and seeing the results. Not a ton of experimentation or testing. The scientist in me needed to rectify that, so for my first rolls I decided to put the film through its paces.
With my Minolta α9 (50mm f2.8 macro), I did 5 exposure bracketing with 1/3 stops (200, 160, 125, 100, and 80) in 6 different lighting conditions (outdoor overcast, outdoor high noon full sun, outdoor at dusk, indoor fluorescent lights, indoor direct flash, and indoor bounced flash). The α9 made this a breeze, I just set the film to the custom 125 ISO and switched to continuous bracket mode with 1/3 intervals (custom setting 11 to have the ISO in descending order) and with one press in aperture priority mode on the cable release I had 5 shots at different shutter speeds, one at each exposure level. I recruited my wife to wear a variety of colors and had her hold a cheap color card for some consistency to compare the conditions. In addition, I had the film scanned on a Noritsu, a Frontier, and then also I scanned it myself on my Epson v600 to compare the different options since the first iteration of Phoenix had scanning complications.
The Biggest Impact, the Scanner
While I knew there would be a difference with scanners I didn’t expect this big of a difference. I asked the lab (Thanks Brooktree Film Lab!) to do the default Harman recommendation for each scanner with no extra corrections, and I tried to do the same for my manual inversion with the v600 but by nature of inversion with any method there is some post-processing being done.
While its all subjective, if I had to pick “the best” overall results color wise I’d give it to the manual inversion (I use the free Negadoctor module in Darktable). While the v600 resolution is god awful in comparison to either dedicated scanner, it gave the most accurate to reality colors, especially with a pale skin tone indoors. I am aware that the colors could be adjusted in further post-processing for all of the scans; however, I know a large portion of the analog community tries to do minimal if any edits beyond adjusting the white and black points. I will say the Frontier is not far off and for my own personal use case I will be using that for all 35mm Phoenix scans as flatbed scanning 35mm is terrible resolution and time wise, and a digital camera/dedicated 35mm scanner setup is not in the cards for me at the moment.
My main takeaway from comparing the scanners is that even with Harman’s recommendations, there IS a noticeable difference depending on the scanner, so people may have to do some shopping around for their preferred final images.
Phoenix II’s True ISO?
Honestly shooting Phoenix at variable exposure levels didn’t really have too much of an impact. I chose to only overexpose here because other reviews had done some simple +1 and -1 bracketing and like all color film underexposure without pushing the film in development leads to worse results. Its not a small secret that Phoenix I’s “True ISO” was 125 so a 5 bracket exposure with 1/3 intervals gave me a great range.
So which ISO worked best? Unfortunately again its really subjective. In my opinion shooting it at 200 is bordering on underexposure with the shots beginning to lose detail in the shadows and shooting it at 80 is bordering on overexposure with the highlights starting to get blown out. Overall its an improvement over Phoenix I at box speed, and if you give it plenty of light (the low light dusk and no flash indoor shots look the worst overall to me) its going to give mostly correct exposures for you at any of these ISOs, . Most people prefer to overexpose color film anyways so the middling ISOs are going to probably be your best bet, and I’ve already begun shooting more of this film at 125.
Final Thoughts
I had a lot of fun planning, shooting, and putting together the results for this roll of film, and I hope more and more new film comes out so I can maybe do this again in the future.
But more importantly as for Phoenix II overall, I like this film! I plan on shooting a lot of it in bright sunny situations or for some studio portraits. The smaller relative grain of the film in 120 format (see sunflower picture, iso 125 scanned on v600) is absolutely fantastic (4x5 Phoenix would be AMAZING).
Based on the results of this experiment I’m going to rate the film at 125 ISO and have it scanned on a Fuji Frontier for the vast majority of my rolls.
The colors are bold, the future of film is bright, and I’m going to be shooting Phoenix II until Phoenix III rises from its ashes with even more improvements.
Thanks again to Brooktree Film Lab for the great communication and scans.
