Agfacolor RSX II 100

RSX II 100 was Agfa's last serious answer to Provia and Sensia in the ISO 100 E-6 slot, launched in spring 1999 as the second generation of the Reversal Slide line and produced in Leverkusen until the AgfaPhoto bankruptcy in 2005. The first-generation RSX had landed in 1995 and was already considered a credible competitor in the European market. The II revision tightened color separation and lifted shadow detail.

The character was not the screaming saturation of Velvia or the studied neutrality of Provia 100F. RSX II sat closer to Sensia in spirit, with restrained color, slightly cool whites, and a midtone curve that read as elegant rather than dramatic. Skin tones came back with a Northern European cast, a touch less warm than Kodak Elite Chrome and a touch more neutral than Fuji Astia. Reds were honest. Greens leaned forest rather than emerald.

Latitude was tighter than Provia 100F by maybe a third of a stop. Bracket if the contrast was high. Pros metered incident and trusted the result. Agfa published their own reciprocity table that ran cleaner than the Fuji equivalents, which is part of why long-exposure shooters experimented with RSX II before the family was gone.

The emulsion did not vanish entirely. Lomography's X-Pro Slide 200 is widely understood to be based on Aviphot Chrome 200 PE1, the aerial-survey descendant of RSX II 200, which Agfa Gevaert still coats in Belgium. The ISO 100 variant has no current equivalent. Freezer stock from the late nineties surfaces on eBay at prices that drift upward each year.

Sold in 35mm, 120, and a full range of sheet film sizes from 9x12 cm up to 8x10. The 120 is the format most worth chasing if you find it, better stored on average and more useful for measured work.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second on the standard curve, so a 30-second meter reading becomes roughly 35 seconds at the slide. The math is mild, but for E-6 work past four seconds the color crossover question matters more than the exposure correction, and there is no clean formula for that.