Agfacolor XR 100

XR 100 was the workhorse of Agfa's consumer color negative line through the 1980s. The XR designation, which Agfa kept until the rebrand to Vista in the late nineties, covered amateur C-41 stock sold at every drugstore and camera shop in Europe. ISO 100 was the standard speed for daylight family photography, and XR 100 was what Germans loaded into their Praktikas when they needed prints from the corner Foto-Quelle.

The color character is what makes Agfa stocks recognizable to anyone who has scanned a shoebox of prints from a European household. Reds run warm but not orange, closer to brick-red than to the saturated red of a Coca-Cola can. Greens lean a touch yellow, which made foliage look more lived-in than the bluish green Kodak Gold rendered. The film was less neutral than Kodak Gold 100 and less saturated than Fuji Reala, sitting in a third space German amateurs preferred.

Grain was moderate by modern standards. The cubic-crystal architecture predated the T-grain era; Agfa's coupler chemistry compensated by holding shadow density well. Latitude ran two stops over and one under at box speed. Many photographers rated XR 100 at EI 64 and trusted the lab to pull the contrast back. Compared with Kodak Gold 100, the highlights compressed earlier and the shadows held a touch better.

Production wound down in the early to mid-1990s as the line was reorganized under HDC and eventually Vista. By 2005 the Agfa color portfolio went down with AgfaPhoto's insolvency. Cold-stored rolls from the late 1980s still produce usable negatives with slight color shifts.

Sold in 35mm cassettes plus 110 cartridges and a small 120 run. The 120 is the rarest survivor.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, which puts a 30-second meter reading at roughly 60 seconds at the negative. On stock decades old, the curve drifts further than the math predicts, and a half stop of extra exposure on top of the correction is reasonable insurance for tripod work past ten seconds.