Kodak · ISO 800 Color negative
Kodak Portra 800 (original)
The original Portra 800 came out in 1998 as the fast member of the new Portra family, alongside Portra 400 and Portra 160. It took over the fast slot from Ektapress PJ800, Kodak's previous professional 800-speed color negative, and unlike its slower siblings it never split into NC and VC versions. There was one 800 emulsion in the launch family, balanced halfway between the warmer-skin NC look and the punchier VC contrast that the 400 and 160 offered separately. Wedding shooters working under mixed reception light loaded it because it was Kodak's only professional 800 at the time and because its skin response did not collapse under tungsten.
Kodak revised the emulsion in 2006 for finer grain and again later for better digital scanning. The Portra 800 you can still buy today is the 2006-era stock, while the "original" means the 1998 to 2006 launch formulation. Most photographers cannot tell them apart in print, but lab techs who scanned both during the changeover insist the original ran warmer and grainier and showed more obvious tungsten bias than the current sheet.
Compared to the original Portra 400 the latitude was tighter, which is normal for an 800-speed color stock. Push to 1600 gave usable results with shadows that held more detail than Fuji's competing NPZ at the same speed. Pull to 400 was viable for studio work but flattened the contrast. The DIR coupler technology that made Portra 400NC forgiving carried over in less dramatic form.
Format availability covered 35mm in 24 and 36 exposure cassettes and 120 in five-pack pro packs. There was no sheet film version. Surviving boxes of the 1998 to 2006 emulsion are hard to find unrefrigerated in usable condition; dye couplers in 800-speed color negatives degrade faster than slower stocks.
Reciprocity exponent is 1.10, the same as on current Portra. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading lands at about 35 seconds, a small enough nudge that most reception shooters never needed to think about it.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 800. Picker exposes pull/push chips so you can shoot it at any speed you want and the meter follows.
- Reciprocity: Above one second the app raises metered time to the power of 1.10.
- Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. Color negative decay rates are baked in.