Kodak Royal Gold 400

Royal Gold 400 was the film Kodak rolled out in 1994 when they pulled Ektar 400 off the shelves. Same emulsion family, retuned a little, rebadged. The decision was commercial more than chemical: Gold sold and Ektar did not, so Kodak attached the more recognizable brand name to what was effectively their pro-leaning consumer 400 stock and aimed it at people who actually printed enlargements rather than just dropped rolls at the corner drugstore.

The film sat in the lineup as a step up from Gold 400, with finer grain and slightly more saturated color. The Print Grain Index landed around 41, the same number Kodak published for Royal Gold 200, which gives you a rough sense of why people kept buying it: shot well, the grain at 4x6 prints was indistinguishable from a 200-speed consumer stock. It got rebranded again in the early 2000s as Kodak High Definition 400, then Royal Supra, before quietly disappearing.

Color is warmer than Fuji Superia 400 of the same era and less neutral than the Portra 400NC that arrived in 1998 to take over the working portrait market. Reds carry a little extra weight. Skin tones run on the rosy side rather than the cool side. For outdoor street and family work it reads pleasantly nostalgic now, which is most of why anyone still hunts down expired rolls.

Format was 35mm only, in 12, 24, and 36 exposure cartridges with DX coding. No 120, no sheet. Production ended around 2005 to 2006 once the High Definition relabel took its slot.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter folds the correction in past one second: a 30-second meter reading becomes about a minute at the negative. For long-exposure indoor work, which was rarely what anyone bought Royal Gold for, that correction does matter.