3M ScotchColor 100

ScotchColor 100 was 3M's consumer color print film, the C-41 counterpart to the Scotch slide line, made at the Ferrania factory in Italy and sold from the mid-1980s into the mid-1990s. It existed because every drugstore in Europe needed a third option next to Kodak Gold and Fujicolor. The film never had a marketing identity beyond being cheaper than Kodak.

In use it sat behind Kodak Gold 100 and Fujicolor HR 100 on fine grain and color accuracy. The negatives ran warm in the highlights and slightly pink across the midtones, a tint that ratchets up once the stock is a few years past expiration. Skin tones came out workable rather than great. Greens were muted, blues did not pop the way Kodak's Gold 100 negatives did. For 4x6 minilab prints in the late 1980s most consumers never noticed; for 8x10 enlargement or modern scans, the gap is obvious.

The Ferrania heritage shows in the grain structure, which is cubic rather than tabular. Kodak had moved consumer color into T-Grain by the mid-1980s with the Kodacolor VR-G line, and 3M / Ferrania never quite caught up. The result is an old-fashioned look some photographers now seek out, the way Fomapan and Adox get bought for their pre-modern grain character.

Format was 35mm in 24 and 36 exposure cassettes. No 120, no sheet. Process in standard C-41. Expired stock needs color correction on the scan side to compensate for magenta base fog in the dye couplers.

3M sold the imaging division to Imation in 1996 and ScotchColor 100 was rebadged or dropped depending on the market. The Ferrania factory carried on into the early 2000s and stopped in 2009 when the Italian operation closed. eBay rolls sell mostly as lomography curiosities.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.2 in Zone Light Meter, applied past one second. A metered 10-second exposure becomes about 16 seconds at the negative. For the indoor snapshot the film was used for in its day, that correction rarely mattered; it matters more now, loading an expired cassette for a long-exposure experiment.