Fujifilm Press 400

Press 400 was the same emulsion as Fujicolor Superia 400. The difference was logistics. Fuji pulled the same master roll, slit it, packaged it in Press livery, and kept the cassettes cold from the factory through distribution. Newspaper shooters paid the small premium because they did not want to find out their box had spent a summer in a hot van between Tokyo and Frankfurt. The emulsion did not change. The keeping did.

Which means the character is Superia 400 character: the fourth cyan-sensitive layer Fuji introduced with Reala in 1989, Super Fine Sigma grain, and a color signature cooler and greener than Kodak Gold 400 or Ultramax. Skin under daylight reads slightly cool. Foliage stays leafy rather than going yellow. Fluorescent gym light, the mixed indoor mess press shooters actually meet, comes back legible rather than nuclear green. That last property was the whole reason to load this stock for daily news work.

Grain at ISO 400 is finer than the consumer Superia X-Tra of the same era, because refrigerated stock had not picked up the slow fog that warm-stored film carries by the time it reaches the camera. Latitude is honest: a stop over prints cleanly, a stop under blocks shadows the way any ISO 400 negative will. Compared with Pro 400H, when that was alive, you traded cleaner pastels for a much higher price tier. Compared with Kodak Tri-X, the look reads journalistic rather than commercial.

Press 400 came in 35mm only, typically in twenty-roll pro packs. Fuji discontinued the Press line in 2008 as the wire services went digital. Freezer-stock still surfaces on auction sites; warm-stored examples from 2005 onward usually shift magenta past date.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second metered exposure becomes about 60 seconds at the negative. Press shooters working at ISO 400 rarely got into that territory, but for the occasional long lens on a tripod at twilight, the math kept the shot from being a stop short.