Kodak Vericolor III VPS 160

Vericolor III is the film Kodak made before Portra existed. Kodak introduced the Vericolor line in 1974 and rolled out the third-generation VPS 160 emulsion in 1983 for studio, wedding, and editorial portrait work. It ran roughly fourteen years until Kodak's own April 1997 technical data sheet labeled it discontinued and pointed customers at Portra 160NC as the replacement.

The signature is a soft toe, moderate contrast, and moderate color saturation, all of which are Kodak's own words for a film that does not flatter you by exaggerating anything. Skin sits inside a tight neutral palette without the magenta lean modern Portra is famous for. Kodak rated it ISO 160 on the box, but the data sheet acknowledges many photographers preferred EI 125 for a bit more contrast and a thicker negative. Wedding and studio shooters who learned the film in the late eighties almost always pulled it down a third of a stop.

Available formats during the production run were generous: 35mm, 120, 220, sheet sizes through 8x10, and a 70mm long roll for studio cameras. That breadth is part of why working pros stayed with Vericolor through the early Portra years.

One quirk worth knowing on expired stock: the film uses dye-masking color couplers and Kodak rated it as not subject to leucocyan-dye formation, which made it less susceptible to bleaching errors at the lab. Anything you find now is past twenty-five years old and will have lost speed and shifted magenta. Most expired-stock shooters rate it at EI 80 or slower and treat the color drift as character. Process is straight C-41.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Kodak said no correction needed from 1/10,000 to 1/10 second. Past one second Zone Light Meter applies the 1.10 curve: a metered 30-second exposure becomes about 35 seconds at the negative, barely a correction at all. Vericolor was designed around short exposures with daylight or flash, so long work was always something you did against the film, not with it.