Konica Centuria Super 400

Konica's marketing claim for Centuria Super 400, repeated in the February 2002 datasheet, was the highest actual speed in class. That phrase reflected a real improvement over the 1999 Centuria 400 it replaced. The MCC and UCC emulsion let Konica deliver a true ISO 400 stock with grain tighter than Fujicolor Superia 400 of the same period, with the trade-off being a shorter highlight range than Kodak Gold Max 400 offered.

The Super 400 datasheet specifies ISO 400/27, triacetate base, daylight balance, DX-code 26-5. Emulsion numbers ran in the 400 to 499 block. Processing was C-41 or Konica CNK-4. Format is 35mm only. The older non-Super Centuria 400 from 1999 had a 120 option which the Super refresh dropped.

The rendering is what Japanese wedding shooters who could not afford Portra reached for through 2005. Skin tones came back natural without the green cast that affected cheaper consumer 400-speed competition. Reds rendered warmer than Fuji Superia 400 and less orange than Gold 400. Greens leaned cooler than either. The film handled mixed indoor light better than its peer stocks predicted, with a recoverable orange shift under tungsten rather than the green collapse that plagued cheap 400-speed films of the era.

Latitude ran around three stops over and one to two stops under, comparable to Gold 400 and slightly more forgiving than Superia 400. Pushed to 800 in standard C-41 it holds together better than Superia at the same push, but the look gets warmer in skin. Pulled to 200 it cleans up without much shift.

Production wrapped with the Konica Minolta imaging shutdown in March 2006. The brief DNP revival from 2007 to 2009 carried what some users believe was rebadged Kodacolor 400 rather than genuine Konica stock.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 30-second exposure becomes about 60 seconds at the negative. The datasheet specifies no compensation from 1/10000 to one second and one stop at ten seconds.