Harman Phoenix 200

Harman Phoenix 200 is the first color negative film from a company that has made B&W film for over a century. The original Phoenix released in late 2023 sold out within days and stayed backordered for months. Phoenix II arrived in 2025 with modest refinements to consistency. Both versions are deliberately imperfect: the grain is large and irregular, color balance shifts unpredictably between warm and cool casts depending on light source, and the latitude is narrow enough that a two-stop exposure error produces noticeably different color rendition.

Those qualities are the design intent, not bugs under repair. Harman was transparent about calling it an experimental emulsion, an honest description that most film companies avoid when launching a product. Photographers who bought Phoenix during the first release understood what they were getting, and many of them loved exactly what made it technically flawed: the film does not look like any other color negative on the market because the color couplers and layer structure were developed by a company with no prior color emulsion history.

Exposing Phoenix in warm afternoon sun tends to produce a yellow-green cast in midtones that some photographers find painterly. In shade or overcast it shifts toward blue-purple. In mixed indoor light it produces color combinations that are difficult to predict and sometimes surprising. If you need accurate color reproduction this is not the film; if you want a stock that visually declares itself as film rather than pretending to be digital, it earns that.

Available in 35mm only at launch.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10, the gentlest in the catalog. Long exposures stay close to the metered value; a 30-second reading corrects to about 55 seconds. Zone Light Meter applies the Phoenix curve past one second, which makes low-light and long-exposure shooting with this unusual stock as straightforward as it can be.