Ferrania Solaris 100

Solaris 100 was the consumer color negative film that Ferrania produced through its last working years at the Cairo Montenotte plant, sitting alongside the 200 and 400 speeds in the same product family. Color sat between Kodak's warmth and Fuji's coolness, with a slight reddish cast that some shooters loved and others corrected out in scanning. The film was meant for snapshooting more than serious portrait or product work, and the European drugstore price reflected that.

The emulsion was a conventional C-41 color negative, no exotic crystal architecture, no claims about extended latitude. Grain at ISO 100 was finer than the Solaris 200 and 400 speeds in the same line, and the film resolved cleanly enough that prints to 8x10 from 35mm were not grain-limited. Latitude was workmanlike, around three stops over and a stop under, similar to consumer Kodak Gold 100 or Fuji Superia of the era.

Ferrania announced in July 2008 that color production would cease by December, and the last Solaris coatings ran somewhere in that window. The factory wound down through 2009 and the last building was locked in 2010. FILM Ferrania, the 2013 revival, has talked about reintroducing Solaris-derived color at 100, 200 and 400 speeds, but as of now only the P30 B&W stock has actually come out of the new line.

All surviving Solaris 100 is expired, generally past 2008. Color shifts trend toward magenta and the film picks up base fog faster than Kodak or Fuji stocks of similar age. Some users find the shifts pleasant. Others rate it at 50 to compensate.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading becomes about 60 seconds at the negative. For tripod work on expired stock, treat the calculated correction as the minimum and add another stop on top because the film's keeping has eroded whatever safety margin the original engineers built in.