Summer of ‘76 ?

A little while back, there was a minor bit of excitement triggered on the photowebs with the announcement of a new reversal (”slide”) film under the Rollei brand, called Variochrome. It was supposed to be usable between ISO 200 and 400, although it is DX-coded at 200. Well, being a little tired of waiting around for Ferrania’s slide film (and indeed their P30 monochrome negative), out of curiosity I decided to order a few rolls. After all, there’s not a lot of competition for ISO 400 slide film these days.

I’ve just got the first roll back, shot on my XPan, and my general impression can be fully summed up in one word: disappointing.

I’m not sure what this film really is - “Rollei”, or rather, Maco Photo Products, don’t make their own, so it is repackaged something. The “limited edition” branding is in itself suspicious - why should it be limited, if it is new production? By the look of it, it is some kind of reject Agfa stock. It might hold its own as a retro-70s expired beige tinted novelty stock from Lomography, but packaged in a way which implies it is for serious use is totally inappropriate. Apart from the ghastly colour rendition, the film base is the flimsiest I’ve seen this side of Polachrome. Actually the whole experience is not unlike Polachrome.

Not quite what I had in mind

I wasn’t expecting fine grain or high resolution, and on those two fronts Variochrome doesn’t disappoint.

1:1 zoom at 5300dpi

There also appears to be some light leakage effect on the leader and first two frames (well, last two given how the XPan works). I’ve never seen anything like that before, except if I accidentally opened the back, which I last did around 2001. Looks to me either to be a lab error, which is very unlikely - it would be the first ever from the lab I use these days - or light leaking into the canister.

Does anybody have any idea wth happened here ?

It is possible to kind of resurrect something using Silverfast’s excellent midtone correction tools, but it would be far better just to load up a roll of Provia 100F pushed 1 stop.

Local river as Variochrom sees it…

Half-hearted attempt at rescue

Of course it could, just possibly, be a defective sample. Either that, or the marketing around this film is approaching the highly cynical. My advice - avoid at all costs, unless of course you like Abba.

(Actually, looking carefully, the few tiny samples on the Maco website do rather look like they were taken in 1976)