Konica Color VX 100

Konica's VX line replaced the Super XG family in the mid-1990s and ran until the Centuria rebrand in 1999. VX 100 was the slow speed in the lineup. It was aimed at consumer photographers shooting daylight outdoor work, and that is where it earned a quiet following: tight grain, soft pastel rendering, and a price point that undercut Fuji Reala 100 by a noticeable margin in Japan and Europe.

The color signature is the thing Konica owners still talk about. Where Kodak Gold 100 of the same period rendered toward warm yellow and Fuji Superia 100 leaned green-cyan, VX 100 sat in between with a slight cool-pink tendency in skin tones. Greens were muted rather than punchy. Konica's color science genuinely was different from Fuji's and Kodak's, which is why the film still has cult appeal twenty years on.

Grain at ISO 100 was very fine. Konica's marketing made the standard claims about advanced emulsion technology, but in side-by-side prints with Fuji Reala 100 the VX held up well enough that most casual viewers could not tell them apart. Latitude was narrower than Reala; a stop of overexposure was fine, but shadow recovery from underexposure was limited.

Konica merged with Minolta in 2003 and the combined company exited the photo business in 2006. The factory was sold to DNP, which briefly relaunched Centuria in 2007 before discontinuing it in 2009. VX 100 itself stopped around 1999 when the Centuria rebrand took over.

Expired Konica color ages better than expired high-speed Agfa, but worse than expired Fuji Superia. Color shifts come on gradually. Found stock is almost always 35mm; no 120 version was offered in most markets. Process in C-41 at standard times.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure runs to about 16 seconds at the negative, and a 30-second reading lands near a minute. For interior available-light work the threshold comes up often enough to matter.