Fujifilm Superia X-Tra 400

Superia X-Tra 400 was the film in the camera when most people who picked up photography in the 2000s shot their first serious roll. It was priced like a consumer film, available everywhere film was sold, and fast enough to shoot indoors without flash if you had decent light. The X-Tra designation refers to Fujifilm's fourth color layer, a sensitizing layer designed to handle mixed light sources without the color shift that plagued older three-layer emulsions under fluorescent or sodium vapor lighting.

The fourth layer is not a gimmick. Shooting a birthday party with overhead incandescent lamps and a window in the background, Superia X-Tra holds the colors more honestly than ISO 400 stocks without it. The tungsten areas do not go as orange and the daylight areas do not go as blue. For snapshot work this is genuinely useful technology.

Color rendering sits on the green-leaning side of neutral. Not as cool as C200, warmer than Provia. Skin tones are decent in open shade; they can trend slightly green under office fluorescents even with the fourth layer. Grain at ISO 400 in 35mm is visible in anything but small prints or screen-sized scans. In 120 it is finer and more manageable.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.10. A one-second reading in low-light interior work extends to roughly 1.1 seconds corrected, a difference Zone Light Meter handles automatically past the one-second threshold. At faster shutter speeds, which is most of what this film sees, reciprocity is irrelevant.

Was sold in 35mm and 120. The 120 format was discontinued in 2013 and Fujifilm pulled the 35mm version globally in April 2024, replacing it in the Japanese market with FUJIFILM 400, a US-made emulsion sourced from Kodak. The 120 format, before it was pulled in 2013, was the version that attracted medium-format shooters who wanted a fast casual color option without buying Portra. Exposure latitude is reasonable: one stop under is recoverable, two over is usually fine. Rate it at box speed.