Konica SR-G 3200

Konica launched the SR-G 3200 in 1989, two years after their own GX 3200 had made ISO 3200 a consumer reality and the same year Kodak Ektar 1000 hit US shelves. At ISO 3200 it was the fastest color negative film any consumer could buy through a normal counter, and Konica leaned into the marketing around low-light press, concert, and indoor sports work. The earlier GX 3200 from 1987 had been Konica's first ISO 3200 stock, with SR-V 3200 following inside the broader SR-V color line; SR-G replaced it with finer grain and slightly cleaner color.

Honest assessment: the grain is enormous. Side by side with Fujicolor Superia 1600 of the period, the SR-G 3200 reads grainier across the entire frame, not just in shadows. That is the cost of the extra stop. Conventional cubic crystals at ISO 3200 produced visible clumping no matter what coupler chemistry the engineers ran, and Konica was not using the T-grain architecture that Kodak Ektar had brought to the high-speed segment. What you got instead was an emulsion that metered at a true 3200 in most light, which mattered for press work where every stop counted.

Color leaned warm with the orange tilt that Konica negatives carried as a brand signature. Skin tones under tungsten came back recoverable rather than collapsed, which is why it picked up a following with concert and theater shooters who could not justify Fuji RXP 1600 cinema stock prices. Daylight at noon looked muddy on this stock.

Production ended with the Konica film business in 2006. Surviving rolls show up in 35mm 36-exposure cassettes and a less common 120 version that turns up on the expired market. Apply the stop per decade overexposure rule for aged stock, which puts most surviving rolls at an effective ISO 800 or below.

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. At ISO 3200 the threshold rarely arrives, but for any tripod work in dark scenes the math matters, and so does the color crossover that fast consumer negatives showed at exposures past about ten seconds.