Kodak Royal Gold 100

Royal Gold 100 was the consumer-friendly replacement for the original Kodak Ektar 100 after Kodak killed the Ektar line in 1994. Marketing had decided Ektar's segmentation was a problem: too professional sounding for the snapshot crowd, not quite professional enough for the pros who were on Vericolor or Portra. The emulsion got revised, dropped into a yellow box, and sold as Royal Gold. The line ran for only a few years before Kodak phased it out around 1998, and Ektar eventually came back in 2008 under its old name with a fresh T-grain formulation.

The emulsion used T-grain technology, the tabular silver-halide architecture that had already separated T-MAX from cubic-crystal stocks like Tri-X. In color, T-grain meant the grains in each color layer sat flatter against the film base, which gave finer apparent grain at a given speed than the older cubic Kodacolor emulsions. Royal Gold 100 was visibly cleaner than Gold 100 from the same era and held up to enlargements past 11x14 without grain becoming the limit.

Color rendering split the difference between the saturated punch of the original Ektar and the muted skin-friendly look Portra would later be known for. Reds came up with energy but not Velvia loud. Skies stayed credibly blue rather than going cyan. Compared with Fujifilm's contemporary Reala 100, the Kodak ran slightly warmer; Reala had the edge in mixed fluorescent light.

Fresh stock is long gone. What you find on eBay or in estate-sale freezers dates from 1996 to 1999, which means twenty-five-plus years of age even on the best-kept rolls. Rate it down to ISO 50 or 64 and accept some red shift in shadows. The negatives still scan.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second; a metered 30-second exposure becomes about a minute at the negative. For long tripod work indoors at small apertures, the doubling matters, and on aged stock the failure may run worse than the math predicts.