created/modified 2018-06-27
Kodak Gold 200 Film Profile/Review
This tech page is for Kodak Gold 200 Film, or GOLD_200, which is it’s film code. Kodak Gold 200 Film is a consumer grade film and provides an excellent combination of color saturation, color accuracy, and sharpness in a 200-speed film. Excellent for picture-taking under general lighting conditions. GOLD_200 is available in 135 (35mm) format.
Development
If you send your film in to us here at Simple Film Lab, we develop GOLD_200 with Kodak’s Flexicolor line of C-41 processing chemicals. 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 GOLD_200 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 100 and that will result in totally usable negatives. GOLD_200 has enough over-exposure headroom to handle 3-4 stops over exposure.
Dynamic Range/Exposure Latitude
GOLD_200 has good dynamic range. You have to get at least 2-3 stops over exposed in a high contrast scene before things start to get dicey in the highlights.
Resolution/Grain
GOLD_200 has fair resolution and fine grain. It’s not the finest grain film around, but the grain is very pleasant. Kodak’s tech sheet rates it’s Print Grain Index for a 4×6 print at 44, with 25 being the visual threshold, so it’s got grain, but again, it’s nothing I’d complain about. If anything, it makes images look very film like, which is pretty much how I remember film looking like when I grew up. Kodak does not publish an MTF curve for this film, so I don’t know what where it tops out resolution-wise, but it has enough resolution that you can make a very nice looking 8×10 without it looking totally soft.
Sample Images
Here is a Flickr image album of images taken with GOLD_200. It’s updated with new images whenever I shoot GOLD_200.
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
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