created/modified 2018-08-30
Fuji PRO 400H Film Profile/Review
This tech page is for Fujifilm PRO 400H Film, or PRO_400H, which is it’s film code. Fuji PRO_400H film is a professional grade film and Fuji touts it as a new-generation professional daylight type color negative film incorporating Fujifilm’s proprietary fourth color-sensitive layer in addition to the conventional three RGB-sensitive layers. PRO_400H provides faithful reproduction of neutral grays with sharply improved fidelity over a wide exposure range from under to over exposures. It produces superb skin tones with smoothly continuous gradation from the highlights to the shadows, and gives an excellent three-dimensional feeling in such details as fabrics and other textures. PRO_400H is available in 135 (35mm) format, 120 format, and 220 format.
Development
If you send your film in to us here at Simple Film Lab, we develop PRO_400H with Kodak’s Flexicolor line of C-41 processing chemicals (yes, we know, however, C-41 is standardized and so it doesn’t really matter). The C-41 process is very standardized, and we monitor our process with Kodak control strips to ensure that the process is within specification to ensure that the film is correctly developed.
Exposure Guidance
C-41 color negative films are pretty standardized, where you have roughly 4 1/3 stops of shadow detail below middle gray and several stops of detail above middle gray, and PRO_400H is no different. It is recommended that you incident meter for the darkest part of the image where you want to retain detail and subtract 2 stops from that, or if you don’t have an incident meter, place your exposure compensation to +1, or manually set the ISO of your camera to ISO 200 and that will result in totally usable negatives. PRO_400H has enough over-exposure headroom to easily handle 4-5 stops over exposure.
It’s pretty common for a lot of PRO_400H shooters to over expose by 2 or more stops. While you can do this, and in most cases, you won’t have a problem, the more you over expose the grainier it is and the less discrete tone steps you’ll have per stop of exposure, so you’ll lose some tonal information if you get too aggressive with over exposure, so do be careful. The better practice is to meter for the important shadow details and put those 2 stops down from middle gray.
Dynamic Range/Exposure Latitude
PRO_400H has excellent dynamic range. You have to get at least 3-4 stops over exposed in a high contrast scene before things start to get dicey in the highlights.
Resolution/Grain
PRO_400H has excellent resolution for a 400 speed film. The grain is pretty present, but very pleasant. Fuji does not rate it’s granularity the same as Kodak, so there’s no easy way to directly compare the two just by looking at their tech sheets. That being said, PRO_400H is definitely grainy, but it’s not really obtrusive. Fuji’s published MTF curve for this film shows PRO_400H topping out at between 50 and 60 line pairs per mm at 50% contrast response. Fuji does not break out the per color channel resolution the same way that Kodak does, so I’m assuming that this is for their highest resolution channel, probably the blue channel.
Sample Images
Here is a Flickr image album of images taken with PRO_400H. It’s updated with new images whenever I shoot PRO_400H.
Downloadable Sample DNG Files
As part of this tech sheet/film review I’m making a ZIP file available that contains some Adobe DNG files that are a sample of what you would receive if you sent your film into Simple Film Lab to process and scan. It’s relatively large, but if you want to see what you can get, worth a look. Click Here
You must be logged in to post a comment.