Agfacolor XR 1000

Agfacolor XR 1000 (later marketed as XRS 1000 in the professional line) sat at the upper edge of what C-41 color negative could do in the mid-1980s. Agfa launched it in 1984 alongside the rest of the XR family at ISO 100, 200, 400, and 1000. The 1000 was the headline product. Press shooters wanted high-speed color that did not look like garbage under sodium vapor or stage lighting, and this was the answer Agfa offered before Fuji and Kodak caught up later in the decade.

The grain is large. There is no polite way to put it. Compared with Kodak Ektapress 1600 from the same era, XR 1000 holds its own on color accuracy and gives up roughly the grain you would expect for the speed. The dye-coupler chemistry was tuned to maintain saturation under tungsten and mixed sources, which is why working journalists liked it for venue work. In daylight it reads slightly cool next to Fuji of the period.

Latitude is reasonable for the speed class. A stop of overexposure prints fine. Half a stop under starts losing shadow color before it loses density. Most photographers rated it at 800 to buffer the shadows, especially for concerts where the lighting was unpredictable.

Worth knowing if you bought a roll today: it has been off the market since the mid-1990s, and any film you find is thirty-plus years old. High-speed color is the most fragile combination for long storage. Expect heavy base fog, magenta or cyan shifts, and sensitivity loss of roughly a stop. Rating found stock at 400 is a reasonable starting point.

Formats are freezer-stock or expired only. Agfa offered it in 35mm and 120; no sheet sizes were produced. Process in C-41. Pull development by 10 percent can help tame the grain build-up.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure works out to roughly 16 seconds at the negative, and a 30-second reading climbs to close to a minute. For available-light interiors at narrow apertures, those numbers come up regularly even at ISO 1000.