Lucky Color 200

Lucky Color 200 is one of only a handful of genuinely new color negative emulsions to reach the market in the past two decades, arriving after Harman Phoenix 200 launched out of Mobberley in late 2023. Lucky Film stopped color production in 2012 after the digital crash gutted demand. They restarted the line in 2024 and launched the new stock on July 17, 2025 at the Shanghai Image & Vision Expo, where the first hundred online rolls sold out in seconds.

The signature is red. Not warm in the Kodak Gold sense where yellows lean into honeyed midtones; Lucky 200 pushes saturated rosy-reds with cleaner cyan separation than Gold and a contrast curve that runs steeper than Fuji C200. There is a saying going around Chinese film circles right now: Kodak is yellow, Fuji is green, Lucky is red. The first batch backs that up. Grain sits between ColorPlus 200 and Fuji C200, closer to the Fuji end of that spread but not as fine as Portra 160.

Process in any C-41 lab. Meter at box speed in daylight and the negatives scan with minimal correction. Under overcast or indoor tungsten the colors collapse into a flat grayish wash; this is not a flexible-light film yet. Treat it as a fair-weather emulsion until production matures.

The initial run is marked Color 200T (T for testing) and is hand-coated rather than machine-coated. Expect occasional white or blue speck artifacts on scans. Future batches will move to machine coating and clean that up.

Priced at 59 yuan a roll inside China, roughly 8 US dollars before international markup. Reflx Lab handles some export but availability outside Asia stays intermittent through early 2026. Available in 35mm and a small 120 release added to the second batch.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.2. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 10-second exposure becomes about 16 seconds at the negative. Long-exposure performance is the weakest part of the current formulation; twilight skies tend to go flat gray rather than rendering color, so frame the night work for the foreground and treat the sky as silhouette.