Anscochrome 200

Anscochrome 200 has a NASA pedigree most slide film never gets near. The emulsion started in 1961 as FPC-132, a high-speed reversal stock Ansco built for the Mercury program. The film that recorded Alan Shepard inside the capsule on May 5, 1961 was a direct ancestor of the Anscochrome 200 that hit the U.S. market in 1963, rated ASA 200 and pitched as the fastest slide film an amateur could buy. Ektachrome would not catch up on speed for years.

Processing ran in Ansco's own AR-1 chemistry, broadly similar to Kodak's E-4 line but not identical. Where E-4 used benzyl alcohol as a coupler solvent, Ansco built around benzyl amine. Labs that ran one usually did not run the other, which is part of why support collapsed when GAF folded the film business in 1976. By the time Kodak moved everyone to E-6 in 1976, nobody was left to update Anscochrome onto the new line.

The color signature in its prime was warm, slightly cyan-shy, and noticeably softer than Kodachrome of the same era. Against Kodachrome II at ASA 25, Anscochrome 200 looked grainier and a touch muddier. But it gave amateur photographers something Kodachrome could not: a slide they could shoot indoors without a flash gun the size of a hubcap.

Which brings us to the only honest reason anyone still touches this stock. Every roll in circulation is at least fifty years old. The dye couplers in Anscochrome were unstable even when fresh, and surviving slides from the late sixties are mostly magenta-shifted ghosts of themselves. If you find a sealed brick at an estate sale and run it through B&W reversal, you might get something. Expect heavy fog and color crossover. Treat the result as a found object.

No current source. Discontinued in 1976, never reissued.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10, and Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 10-second metered reading becomes about 13 seconds at the negative. With stock this old, dye instability swamps any reciprocity math, so meter, bracket two stops in each direction, and accept whatever comes out.