Adox Color Implosion 100

Adox Color Implosion was an experimental color negative with the color couplers deliberately broken at the factory. Adox introduced it at Photokina 2012 and ended production around 2017, with the official discontinuation notice in mid-2019. The point was never accurate color. The point was a stock that would lean blue and muted at box speed, push toward red when rated up, and refuse to behave like Portra.

Process is straight C-41. None of the visual character comes from chemistry. The factory pre-treatment partially collapses the color coupling system so magenta and yellow respond unpredictably while red sits closer to a normal curve, and the result is a stock that produces wildly different palettes depending on how you rate it. Shoot at ISO 100 and the world goes blue-grey with red accents punching through. Rate it at 200 and reds explode while everything else drifts toward green-cyan. At 400 the grain gets coarse enough that the image looks more like a memory.

Adox specced the film with the grain quality of an 800-speed emulsion despite the 100 nominal sensitivity. That gives a chunkier negative than Portra 400 at the same scan size. It is not subtle.

Compared to Lomography Redscale, the two share a red-dominant palette but sit in different headspaces. Redscale is reversed conventional film with a warm orange shift across the frame. Implosion holds something close to accurate color in mid-frame areas while the red coupler punches through warm hues. Useful for portraits where one red object anchors a desaturated scene.

Format is 35mm only, 36-exposure cassettes, and only what remains on shelves and in freezers. No 120 was ever produced. Secondary-market prices run two to three times original retail.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure becomes about 16 seconds at the negative; 30 climbs to about 60. Given the film is engineered for unpredictable color, treating reciprocity as precise math is optimistic. Bracket if it matters.