Kodak Ektachrome E100S

Before Kodak split the Ektachrome 100 line into three separate variants, E100S was the main event. Launched in 1996 alongside its warm-balanced sibling E100SW, it ran for six years before being replaced. The S stood for Saturated, though by the standards of what came later with E100VS and certainly compared to Fuji Velvia, calling it saturated required a generous reading. What it actually was: a neutral-to-warm slide film with color that read as accurate under daylight and a modest push in saturation compared to the previous Ektachrome 100 Plus.

Magazine photographers used E100S through the 1990s for editorial work where the goal was faithful color reproduction under controlled studio flash. The emulsion held up to duping better than some alternatives, which mattered when a transparency was going to be copied multiple times for international publication runs. National Geographic, Life, and similar publications ran enormous volumes of E100S through their processing labs in that period.

The grain was fine for ISO 100 of that era. Not as fine as Fuji Provia 100, the RDP II emulsion that came out in 1994 and set the contemporary standard, but acceptable for double-page reproduction at the sizes magazines used. The color balance ran slightly warmer than Provia, which editorial directors sometimes preferred for portraits and sometimes did not for product photography.

Kodak retired E100S in 2002 and replaced it with E100G (neutral) and E100VS (vivid), giving photographers an explicit choice instead of a compromised middle option. The E100G that replaced it was a better film: cleaner grain, more consistent batch-to-batch color, better tolerance for slight overexposure.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. Studio flash work on E100S never triggered it; the exponent only comes into play for location work with long ambient exposures, which was uncommon usage for an editorial studio stock.