Anscochrome 100

Anscochrome 100 arrived in 1965 as the faster running mate to Anscochrome 50, both built on the Agfacolor-derived chemistry Ansco had been refining in Binghamton since 1955. The integral tripack design carried color couplers inside the emulsion layers, a development out of Agfa's Wolfen labs in 1936. That gave the family of films their main practical advantage over Kodachrome: any equipped lab could process them, and so could home darkroom workers with Ansco's reversal kit.

At ISO 100 the film opened up shooting situations Kodachrome users had to flash through or skip. Hand-held interiors. Overcast street work. Late-afternoon portraits in shade. Color was warmer and softer than the slower Kodachrome II of the era, which sat at ASA 25, with greens that leaned toward yellow and skin tones that read flattering rather than literal. Saturation was lower than Ektachrome X, the closest Kodak peer, but the curve was gentler in highlights.

The 100-speed variant existed primarily for 16mm motion picture amateurs and was discontinued in 1968. The wider Anscochrome still line continued slightly longer, but the GAF consumer photo division collapsed in 1977 under Kodak's pressure and that closed the book on the brand.

What killed Anscochrome's afterlife was dye stability. The couplers that made home processing possible were less archival than Kodachrome's separate-coupler chemistry, and slides from this era now show heavy color shifts, cyan loss, magenta crossover, and in bad cases physical separation of the emulsion from the base. If you have a family box from 1967, scan them now. The difference next to a Kodachrome of the same vintage will be sobering.

Format was 16mm motion picture. There is no fresh stock and no commercial E4 processing.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 4-second exposure becomes a hair under 5 seconds at the negative, a small correction that rarely affected exposure decisions even when the film was current. For surviving rolls, reciprocity is the smallest problem.