Adox Scala 160

Scala 160 is Adox's revival of the black and white reversal idea Agfa killed in 2005 when they discontinued Scala 200X. Reversal black and white had been niche even at its peak. Agfa Gevaert in Belgium produced Scala 200X through the 1990s with a dedicated processing chain only a handful of labs ran. When Agfa exited consumer photography, the infrastructure went with it. dr5 in Denver kept reversal alive by pushing negatives through reversal chemistry, but the Scala formula was gone.

Adox brought Scala back as a properly engineered reversal emulsion at ISO 160, sold in 35mm and 120 starting in 2019. The stock is designed for the Adox Scala reversal process or the ADOX SCALA Lab service in Germany. Other services like dr5 will run it, but published curves assume Adox chemistry. Process the roll as a negative in D-76 and you get an unremarkable medium-speed film. Process it correctly and you get glossy positive transparencies of the kind nothing else on the market produces.

Character on the light table is high acutance with a contrasty midtone curve, the result of a reversal process with no negative-to-print step to absorb errors. Skin tones run a touch cool in the highlights, shadows resist filling but do not block. Compared with the original Agfa Scala 200X the new stock sits a third of a stop slower at ISO 160, runs slightly higher in midtone contrast, and shows finer grain thanks to a more modern emulsion than the Agfa Mortsel plant ever applied to reversal coating.

Projection is where it earns its place. A Scala slide on a screen looks like nothing else: silver-on-glass at sizes no print can reach. Some users scan it instead and treat the result as a toned positive scan, which works but misses the point.

Available in 35mm only. Adox slit the entire coating run to 35mm because the base they inherited from Agfa is too thick for 120 and the non-curling layer was tuned for 135. The processing chain is the practical limitation.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.0. Zone Light Meter applies the calculation past one second, and at 1.0 there is no correction: metered time is the shot time. For long-exposure projection work, that is unusual and welcome.