Agfacolor RSX II 200

RSX II 200 was the speed-up sibling of RSX II 100, sold from 1999 to 2005 as part of Agfa's second-generation Reversal Slide line. Inside a market where ISO 100 was the standard professional slide speed, a serious ISO 200 E-6 stock was a small niche occupied by Fuji's Sensia 200 and not much else. RSX II 200 served working press shooters in European editorial markets who wanted handheld available-light slides without dragging a tripod.

Grain at ISO 200 was visibly coarser than the ISO 100 stock, with structure that read as classical E-6 rather than the fine pebble of Provia. Color sat where the rest of the RSX II family sat: cool whites, honest reds, restrained skies. Shadow detail held a half stop better than the 100, an unusual move for the up-speed version in a slide family. Compared with Sensia 200 the contrast was a touch harder.

The afterlife matters. When AgfaPhoto collapsed in 2005, Agfa Gevaert in Belgium kept coating the underlying emulsion for the aerial-survey market under the Aviphot Chrome 200 PE1 name. Lomography spotted this in 2009 and started repackaging it as X-Pro Slide 200, and the same material has surfaced under Rollei Digibase CR200. Buy a roll of either and shoot it in E-6 rather than cross-processed to see what the original looked like.

Latitude was narrow in the slide-film way. Two-thirds of a stop of overexposure and the highlights walked. A third of a stop under and the shadows blocked. Bracket if you cared.

Sold in 35mm and 120. The 120 turns up less often on the expired market, partly because it was bought by working pros who shot through their stock.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, so a 30-second meter reading lands at roughly 35 seconds at the slide. For E-6 work past about four seconds, the color crossover question becomes more important than the time correction.