Rollei Paul & Reinhold 100th Anniversary Film Review

At the height of the colour film shortage of 2021, I visited my local camera shop, Kerrisdale Cameras, which had Ektar (it was sold out everywhere else). Lucky for me and unlucky for my wallet, Kerrisdale also had lots of other shiny emulsive things, amongst which stood a festive-looking two-pack of monochrome film, Rollei Paul & Reinhold 100th Anniversary — ISO 640.

“Not buying this film would just be silly,” thought I. The package doubles as a film holder, and this film is no doubt of a limited run: a brand can celebrate a century of relevance just once!

Though this kind of logic often yields wasted cash, Rollei* did not disappoint with their sharp, contrasty film that worked remarkably well with my TC-1 during the foggy winter walks around Surrey, BC.

In this review: Grain structure, resolution, sharpness. Dynamic range and contrast. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

✱ — This film is distributed by Maco Direct, a German photographic retailer. They license the Rollei brand name for their films.

Grain structure, resolution, sharpness.

For an ISO 640, P&R is a very detailed film. It’s sharp and fine-grained. Without a spec sheet, it appears to render more details than Ilford XP2 400 and Kodak Tri-X 400 or on par with JCH StreetPan 400.

In 35mm, the grain will be visible on 12” prints though it’s not overbearing like that of XP2 and looks to add a pleasing texture when developed in Ilford DD-X.

Dynamic range and contrast.

I shot my Paul & Reinhold 100th at box speed, which gave me a lot of contrast at the low end and a lot less contrast in the highlights.

I loved how my darker exposures turned out on this film. The shadows produced very little detail, but the grain made the transition into blackness appear “alive and grungy.”

​✪ Note: I use this method to scan all film for my reviews. It creates consistent results that make understanding and comparing the emulsion’s colour/contrast attributes possible.

If you’re looking to preserve some detail in the shadows with your film, Paul & Reinhold 100th may not be the one for the task. As you can see in the examples, there’s very little left in the dark regions.

You may try rating your film at ISO 400 or lower (or simply add a stop or two to your exposures). Paul & Reinhold will save a lot of visual data for you there. However, I’m not particularly happy with the results I got while trying to add contrast and reduce the brightness digitally in Photoshop. The grain appeared overbearing when I saw my scans on a large monitor.

✪ Note: Try viewing this page on a laptop, desktop, or a large tablet if you want to notice the grain in the images here.

Perhaps you’ll get better results using another method or when printing optically. Here is mine:

That is not to say that this film can not look good when taking pictures of bright scenes. As long as I got some meaningful shadows in my shot, I was lucky enough to get some nice-looking pictures.

In fact, Paul & Reinhold 100th gave me a lot of keepers — or photos I was happy to have taken and proud to share. It’s too early to tell if it’s the film, the seldom but brilliant light of the moody West Coast weather, or if it’s something I did.

❤ By the way: Please consider making your Rollei Paul & Reinhold 100th Anniversary film purchase using this link  so that this website may get a small percentage of that sale — at no extra charge for you — thanks!