Lomography X-Pro Slide 200

X-Pro Slide 200 is a repackaging of Agfa Gevaert's Aviphot Chrome 200 PE1, an aerial-survey emulsion built on the bones of the discontinued Agfa RSX II 200. Lomography started selling it in April 2009 after discovering that Agfa Gevaert in Belgium still coated the stock for non-photographic clients. The same emulsion has shown up over the years under the Rollei Digibase CR200 name and as part of the Rollei Crossbird kit, which is a useful tell when you are trying to match results across brands.

The whole point of the film is cross processing. Run it through E-6 as a proper transparency and you get clean, slightly cool slides with the kind of restrained color you would expect from an aerial film. Run it through C-41 instead, which Lomography calls X-Pro, and the slides come back as negatives drenched in cyan and acid yellow with crushed contrast. Skies go lime; skin tones go alien. That is the look people buy it for. Velvia it is not.

Grain is coarse for an ISO 200 stock, especially after cross processing pushes the contrast curve. Latitude is narrow, like most slide films, so plan to nail exposure within a third of a stop if you want any midtone information to survive. Many shooters meter for highlights and let the shadows fall, the same approach a Velvia 50 shooter would take, except the consequences of error are stranger rather than blocked.

Available in 35mm and 120, sold in three-roll bricks. Production runs have become irregular as Agfa Gevaert's aerial business shifts.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, which puts a 30-second meter reading at roughly 35 seconds at the negative. The correction is mild enough that night cross processing is workable, though you will see color shifts in the long-exposure range that no math can predict.