All the C-41 ISO 800 Colour Films, Compared

Portra 800 vs. FunSaver 800 vs. Lomo 800 vs. Aurora 800

19 min read by Dmitri.
Published on June 24, 2024. Updated on July 4, 2024.

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There’s seemingly some choice when it comes to high-speed daylight-balanced colour-negative film. But is it all just branding? And if not, which one is better?

Daren, Yvonne, and I (with help from our model, Lauren) compare all the ISO 800 films we could find side-by-side to see if there’s any actual difference once developed and scanned.

In this article, Guess! Experiment overview and methods. Setting a FLAT Negative Lab Pro inversion profile. Answer key. Side-by-side: portraits in natural light. Side-by-side: portraits in studio light. Side-by-side: portraits at night. Can these film stocks be made to look exactly the same in Photoshop? How significant are the differences between those films? How are the physical film packs different? Differences in developing and scanning. Price differences. Which film is the best? Project files. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

Watch Daren’s (@LearnFilmPhotography) video interpretation of this experiment: “Lomo, Portra, and Kodak Funsaver 800 compared: Is Portra 800 Worth It?” on YouTube.

Watch Yvonne’s (@YvonneHansonPhotography) video interpretation of this experiment: “Are These Color Filmstocks...Identical? | Testing Portra, Lomography, and Funsaver” on YouTube.

Visit Lauren’s @generalgreavous Instagram profile.

TL: DR; We found that these are indeed different ISO 800 film stocks with varying colour output and some physical dissimilarities. But those differences may be hard to pin down.

Guess!

The image below shows some differences in how the ISO 800 films appear when scanned and inverted manually. Can you guess which one is which? The answer is below the fold. ⤵️

Your options are:

🎞️ Kodak Portra 800 — perhaps the best-known ISO 800 colour-negative film made at the Rochester plant in NY, USA.

🎞️ Lomography Color Negative 800 — a mystery ISO 800 film sold by a famous film photography company that does not own a film factory.

🎞️ Kodak FunSaver 800 — a disposable film camera with 27exp. of an ISO 800 colour-negative film with a “GT 800-5” identifier on the border.

🎞️ Fujifilm 400 — a US-made colour-negative film for Fujifilm, which some suspect is a rebranded Kodak Ultramax emulsion.

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Guess which film was each frame exposed on. Answer below.

✪ Note: All the test photos in this article were shot on 35mm film loaded into Hasselblad 500CM backs with adapters that we exchanged while the camera remained put on a tripod. While some of the films tested were available in medium format, we wanted as much consistency as possible between our tests; thus, we chose a format available with all the participating brandings. All films were shot at EI800.

(You will need a GOLD membership to continue reading this article, download project files, and get the answer for your guess.)

Experiment overview and methods.

Colour negative film needs interpretation — whether it’s printed using an enlarger or scanned.

All hues are typically inversely encoded within an orange mask, which can make the interpretation challenging. Darkroom printers make test strips while adjusting the colour of the projecting light to fine-tune the results. Scanners will produce colour and fidelity differences based on hardware, while the computer software that inverts the negatives into digital positives adds another layer of obscurity as it attempts to automate colour correction.

This photo shows the differences in colour films (in this case, spectral sensitivity) that can’t be erased without literally painting over the image.

Nevertheless, though you get to (or happen to, inadvertently) alter the overall colours of your film, you won’t necessarily be able to make one film look like the other. This comes down to spectral sensitivity, grain, and dynamic range. For example, if the said film can not distinguish between two similar shades of red, it’ll paint them the same colour (and you won’t be able to separate those shades in post), whereas another film may naturally outline that distinction.

While designing this experiment, our assumption was that there would be very little visual difference between the films. This is based on the minimal variance between the distinctly branded Kodak films that Daren and I tested last year (Kodak Gold vs. Kodak ColorPlus).

We wanted to make absolutely sure that we’d see differences between our ISO 800 films if there were any, so we took steps to remove noise/distractions/inconsistencies from our samples. We used Daren’s Hasselblad 500CM on a tripod with interchangeable backs to ensure that each shot is taken from the same angle and with the same lens. We also shot the films in various conditions: natural light, mixed studio light, and mixed outdoor light.

VueScan settings for Nikon Super Coolscan 5000ED: digital negative with a consistent 3.75 exposure gain across all films.

Finally, we had our films scanned by professional lab technicians at The Lab (Vancouver) on their Fuji Frontier machine, then again with Daren’s Sony a7III/Negative Lab Pro (see more on that below), and again on my Nikon Super Coolscan 5000ED/inverted using this method for preserving the original film colours with a consistent exposure gain value of 3.75 in the VueScan settings.

Once again, our test subjects were Kodak Portra 800, Kodak FunSaver 800, Lomography Color Negative 800, and Flic Film Aurora 800.

Fujifilm 400 is our control. We used this film to identify the amount of change to expect from an emulsion that is for sure not another ISO 800 colour film stock. We used the same exposure settings for this film as our ISO 800 stocks (thus, it’s under-exposed by one stop).

This article will not have a definitive answer about the origins of Flic Film Aurora 800 film. Someone suggested it’s the same stuff as the FunSaver camera film (which I learned after our session). Unfortunately, on the day of our shoot, we had a limited number of Hasselblad film backs and decided to load Aurora after we ran out of FunSaver.

Our goal was to find differences rather than similarities between the films, so if you’re curious about testing the FunSaver vs. Aurora theory, please let me know in the comments.

Setting a FLAT Negative Lab Pro inversion profile.

Negative Lab Pro and other inversion tools for film negatives apply colour correction filters to your images automatically. These settings may adapt to the colour and brightness values in each of your images, creating more flattering results but also obscuring nuances specific to emulsions.

You can invert your film negatives manually, which will give you a full account of changes made to the digital negatives. This way, your software won’t cover up your exposure mistakes or the minute differences between various film stocks.

Since we wanted to compare our ISO 800 colour film stocks across various scanners and scanning methods, a digital camera with a macro lens was a must (as it’s one of the most popular home-scanning methods today). Daren’s setup involved his Sony a7iii with Sigma 70mm Art macro (shot at 1/160, 𝒇6.3, ISO 250), a Raleno light pad (95+ CRI), a mounting rig, and his Essential Film Holder. This gave him uncompressed *.ARW files, which he then put through Negative Lab Pro.

Negative Lab Pro settings for a FLAT scan profile.

The typical settings Daren used with his Negative Lab Pro tool made images that all looked good/well-corrected; unfortunately, the filters applied varied based on the input negative (as they should), which made identifying the film difficult because of the “colour shuffling” done by the software. I’d like to reiterate here that the differences between film brands and speeds aren’t always difficult to tell, even when the results are software-processed. Still, we’re dealing with four colour-negative ISO 800 films made presumably by the same factory — so we wanted as much detail and consistency in our data as possible.

To make his NLP conversions less opinionated/more consistent, Daren reached out to the Negative Lab Pro creator, Nate, who got back to him with a checklist to create FLAT (minimal auto-correction) output with Negative Lab Pro:

1. Separate images into natural light (studio or daylight) scenes and blue hour/night scenes.

2. Use Roll Analysis for each separately to create a conversion setting with Darkroom Paper preset for maximum dynamic range.

3. Check all but the “Preset Settings” checkboxes in Sync Settings for both sets.

The results were telling. We went from images that varied greatly across exposures but looked similar across film stocks to photos that resembled manual inversions with my Nikon Super Coolscan 500ED in colour and change patterns between the film stocks:

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Negative Lab Pro normal (middle) and FLAT (bottom) profile conversions compared against manual film inversions (top).

Notice how the FLAT profile images (bottom row) no longer try to hide under-exposures on a slower-ISO film with a blue (?) tint.

Answer key.

Before we dive into the experiment results, let’s recall the quiz. Did you write down your answer? Are you sure you can tell your Portra 800 film from a hacked cheap FunSaver camera? Let’s test that:

#1 is shot on Fujifilm 400 film. This film is less sensitive than ISO 800 films, and thus, it appears darker than the rest.

#2 is Kodak Portra 800. Based on my observations, Portra shows a bit more colour fidelity than the other stocks — though that doesn’t translate to all lighting conditions. I’ll explain in greater detail below.

#3 is Kodak FunSaver 800. Kodak FunSaver can be picked from the rest of the stocks if you pay attention to skin tones, especially in the bright, slightly over-exposed areas.

#4 is Lomography Color Negative 800. Lomography’s ISO 800 stock is nearly identical to Portra, with a slight exception for redder skin tones, better performance in artificial light, higher contrast, and some physical properties that I’ll discuss below.

✪ Note: The order of films remains the same throughout this article’s diagrams (left-to-right: Fuji, Portra, FunSaver, Lomo) — except the night shots, where FunSaver is replaced by Aurora 800.

Side-by-side: portraits in natural light.

The samples I asked you to guess film stocks from were scanned on my dedicated Nikon film scanner and inverted manually without any additional software interventions (other than analogue-digital conversion at the scanner hardware/driver level). I skipped the colour-correction step, which I think made them easier to identify.

However, most of you will probably have the lab take care of the scans or use a tool with automatic colour correction, such as Negative Lab Pro, which is why we included those methods as well in our experiment:

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Natural light portraits on Fujifilm 400, Kodak Portra 800, Kodak FunSaver 800, and Lomography Color Negative 800 films, compared.

We developed all our films at The Lab in their dip & dunk tank. Lab scans are expensive, so we limited those to just Portra and Lomography.

Glancing at those photos from afar doesn’t reveal any significant difference. However, a closer look shows a relative under-exposure on Fujifilm 400 via darker, warmer tones across the image.

Kodak FunSaver film looks a little flat in comparison to other stocks. It shows up as a less saturated image on Nikon Coolscan or lacking some colour variation on Sony a7iii/NLP (it looks as if the photo was taken through a yellow filter).

Lomography Color Negative film looks a little redder than Portra on all scans and it shows significantly more contrast with Nikon Coolscan. It looks better on our lab’s Frontier scanner — but that’s because all of their scans are biased towards green (which we could ask The Lab to adjust in the future).

But that’s just one type of light; it could’ve been a fluke. Let’s see if those differences persist with changing conditions.

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Natural light (backlit) portraits on Fujifilm 400, Kodak Portra 800, Kodak FunSaver 800, and Lomography Color Negative 800 films.

The backlit portraits still show differences between the films, but their manifestation isn’t exactly the same:

Portra 800 with Nikon Coolscan needs the least colour correction; the above image is good enough to publish as-is, whereas the other films show some green tint on the pavement. The Frontier has that backwards — probably due to the choices made by the lab technician.

Fujifilm 400 looks great in this set and the rest of the films are now much harder to tell apart on both Coolscan and NLP scans. But I can still see here that the Lomography scans continue to render the skin tones redder compared to the other stocks and the rest of the scene, while FunSaver still shows less contrast and tonal variation than the rest.

Side-by-side: portraits in studio light.

Studio lighting gives us more control and consistency between shots; plus, we can try various colour gels to see how the films react to unusual conditions. Let’s see how those films perform indoors:

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Studio light (with colour gels) portraits on Fujifilm 400, Kodak Portra 800, Kodak FunSaver 800, and Lomography Color Negative 800 films.

Seeing the scans above, it seems obvious that coloured light has obscured the differences between films, regardless of how they were scanned. The only definitive one I could notice is the slight lack of exposure in the slower ISO Fujifilm 400 emulsion. I want to say that there’s more red in the skin tones rendered by Lomography’s stock and some relative lack of contrast/fidelity with FunSaver on all scans — but I’m not sure what I’m seeing here is practically significant.

Below, you’ll find another set of studio portraits without the colour gels. They show a similar amount of variation between the films as the natural light portraits above.

Side-by-side: portraits at night.

We also stepped outside with Lauren in the evening to see how our films would deal with mixed artificial light.

Historically, daylight-balanced colour films appeared green in print, though digital colour correction tools can usually do a pretty good (but not perfect) job at fixing that. Our task, however, was to see what we’d get without applying any corrections:

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Outdoor (mixed artificial light) portraits on Fujifilm 400, Kodak Portra 800, Flic Film Aurora 800, and Lomography Color Negative 800 films.

This is where Negative Lab Pro instructions for a FLAT profile seem to fall apart.

My guess is that the studio lights we used were daylight-balanced, whereas the street lamps weren’t; in response, NLP over-corrected the green cast I expected under unbalanced artificial light to turn the images red. I can still see the differences between the NLP-inverted films in this set, but the orange cast now obscures them.

We’re also missing Flic Film Aurora 800 scans using Daren’s Sony a7iii/NLP and The Lab’s Fuji Frontier. So, I’ll focus on the Nikon Coolscan strips for this analysis.

Under-exposed Fujifilm 400 did surprisingly well at night when it came to skin tones. But the shadow details on Lauren’s spaghetti strap top are completely gone.

Portra 800 seems to capture the widest dynamic range of all films, but it looks green. Green casts can be corrected, but as I mentioned above, digital editing can not fix all problems.

Flic Film Aurora 800 does the best in this set in terms of colour. It feels a bit red compared to daylight shots, but that’s ultimately the colour of the night illumination in Vancouver (though not nearly as red as NLP interpreted in the middle row). However, I’ve noticed that some shadow details are lacking.

Lomography Color Negative 800 film is a little green and is also missing some details in the shadows compared to Aurora.

Can these film stocks be made to look exactly the same in Photoshop?

I spent nearly an hour editing the sunlit portraits, which showed the clearest differences between our ISO 800 film stocks to look like Portra.

I used a Curves Adjustments Layer to fine-tune contrast, Color Balance to adjust colours in three tonal areas, and a Contrast layer for the final global contrast change.

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Natural light portraits on Fujifilm 400, Kodak Portra 800, Kodak FunSaver 800, and Lomography Color Negative 800 (bottom row) are adjusted to all look like Portra 800 (top row).

The scans I was working with were JPEG layers which introduced compression. If they were uncompressed TIFF files, I might’ve gotten better results (though not significantly so, as neither banding nor JPEG artifacts are visible in the photos above). But I’m not sure that spending more time on these images or even hiring a professional editor for the job would yield results that are significantly closer to Portra.

I’d say it’s certainly possible to “forge” a Portra 800 film look from any of the films mentioned in this article. That wouldn’t be without a trace — both Fujifilm and FunSaver films lost fidelity in the highlights, whereas Lomo 800 still shows more red.

How significant are the differences between those films?

I’ve asked Betty, a casual observer, to identify differences in colour between the four samples of the ISO 800 films I’ve made to look like Portra 800 (top row) above. She could tell that the Lomo is redder than the rest, and she mentioned that FunSaver and Fujifilm looked “darker.” This is after all the work I’ve done to make them look similar!

Daren and Yvonne could also tell the difference between the scans and even ID’d the films with about 75% accuracy when I sent them questions about it over chat.

This, of course, doesn’t mean it’s easy to tell those films apart every time. Backlit and artificially lit shots are harder to differentiate. And there’s no knowing how much of the underlying emulsion’s inherited colour properties may be obstructed by the scanning hardware and software in typical workflows; lab scans showed the least predictable changes in our tests between emulsions.

As someone who got to see all these films side by side, I’d prefer Kodak Portra 800 out of the bunch. However, the differences in how those films look are only apparent in good scans of daylit portraits viewed on a large screen. If I just needed a fast colour film for a casual photo walk, any of the films would do fine.

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How are the physical film packs different?

As analogue photographers, we get to work with film as a physical medium. Edited scans or prints are just part of the equation. Packaging, availability, and other physical properties may be just as important.

As Daren, Yvonne, and I worked with those films on the set of this experiment and elsewhere, we found the following facts about the tested ISO 800 emulsions notable:

Kodak Portra 800 is probably the easiest film to find at your local photography store. It’s very popular, but it can also sell out quickly.

Kodak FunSaver disposable cameras do not come with a good lens and generally aren’t worth saving — unless that’s your project. Extracting film from them is cumbersome, and it only yields 27 frames on a canister without DX code (which means it likely won’t work with your point-and-shoot camera).

Flic Film Aurora 800 also has no DX code and comes in a plastic canister, which I am not a fan of.

Lomography Color Negative 800 always comes in a pack of three, but I find it more difficult to source than the other films.

Differences in developing and scanning.

Kodak Portra 800 makes the flattest negatives that are the easiest to scan out of the bunch. It’s the easiest ISO 800 colour-negative film to work with.

Kodak FunSaver film curls the most after drying. It twists itself into a pretzel out of a tank. Thankfully, that didn’t cause too much trouble while scanning, but it’s something to be aware of if you process your film at home.

Developing and scanning Flic Film Aurora 800 is as easy as Portra 800 — unless you crack your canisters open to load your film reels. I’ve heard numerous complaints about plastic cartridges making that task difficult.

I found Lomography Color Negative 800 very difficult to load into my film reels. It seems that its backing is thinner than that of the other films, which made it frustratingly floppy in the dark bag.

Price differences.

Kodak Portra 800 — as of this writing, Film Price Tracker lists an average price for this film at $20.

Kodak FunSaver cameras are $16 at B&H, but that’s for 27 frames, which is more like $21 if they were 36exp.

Flic Film Aurora 800 is sold for $16 by B&H.

Lomography Color Negative 800 is $58 for three rolls, which comes to about $19 per roll.

Of course, you should check your own retailer’s prices, which could differ significantly from the above.

Which film is the best?

Based on the results of our experiment, it appears that the four ISO 800 colour films are indeed not the same thing.

It’s not just the branding — the films render colours/contrast differently, the negatives have variable physical properties, and their packaging can have an effect on how you use them.

That said, those differences may not be important for your project. Lab scans may obscure each of the films’ looks; if you aren’t taking portraits, perhaps they wouldn’t be visible or consequential (see below for an example).

If you don’t mind having more contrast (at the cost of some shadow detail) and a bit more red hues in your portraits, Lomography Color Negative 800 may be a good choice for you. It’s not that much cheaper than Portra and it can be cumbersome to develop it at home. But lab scanners seem to work well with this film.

FunSaver film is probably not worth your money and hassle. It underperformed in colour, dynamic range, and scanning ease compared to other films. It’s also the most expensive way to shoot an ISO 800 colour-negative film. I’d pick Aurora over FunSaver any day, even though Aurora comes in a plastic canister.

Kodak Portra 800 is better than the other films in almost every aspect of photography — from colour to dynamic range to packaging and film base thickness. It retains the most information, meaning that if you don’t love the colours you see, they are the easiest to adjust with Poretra.

But while the biggest brand in film makes the best high-speed daylight-balanced colour-negative emulsions, you should probably still evaluate how important this may be for your specific project, especially in the context of what’s available to you on the day.

Would you say you can still identify those films if you see them without labels?

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Or if it’s an environmental photo instead of a close-up portrait?

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Or if it was something more abstract?

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Project files.

If you’d like to play with digital negatives and see inverted positives for yourself, you can download the project files here:

➜ Download: ISO 800 Film Test Project Files (3.28GB ZIP)

The above download includes uncompressed full-resolution film negative scans on Nikon CoolScan 5000ED (stitched *.TIFF panoramas) and Sony a7iii (raw *.ARW files). I could only include three key tests: sunlit portrait, backlit portrait, and night portrait — otherwise, it’d be a nearly 30GB download!

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