Harman Phoenix 200 Review
It's always fun to try out a new film stock. Harman Phoenix 200 was released in late 2023. This color film is made by the same company that makes the very popular (and great!) Ilford black and white films. Harman describes the film as having punchy colors and a cross processed vibe.
We picked up two rolls of Harman Phoenix 200 and headed out to Seguin, TX. This is a cool little town about an hour south of Austin. It has a beautiful town square with local shops and an amusement park with a roller coaster! We also snapped a few shots in Austin and Lockhart to finish off the rolls.
Our normal go to film is Kodak Ultramax 400, so we are used to having the flexibility of shooting 400 speed film. Since we were shooting Harman Phoenix 200 on a sunny day this wasn't a huge issue, but it was a little disappointing to not be able to get the aperture settings that we would like for a deep focus. Normally shooting a slower film has the benefit of being less grainy, but this film is actually grainier than the 400 speed we normally shoot.
This film also turned out to be very unforgiving in the shadows and highlights. Large amounts of detail were lost in both areas. We were very disappointed as this ruined a number of our images. A roll of Kodak Ultramax 400 that we shot at the same time turned out great, so we know that metering was not an issue.
The Harman film also has a very strong color cast towards green. This can be nice if you are going for a stylized look, but we found that it dominated most of our images. We prefer to do minimal editing to our images to keep them as true to the film as possible, but even with some Photoshop we found it difficult to get colors that we were happy with from Harman Phoenix 200.
Overall we were disappointed with our experience shooting Harman Phoenix 200. It is unforgiving with mixed lighting, lacks detail, and has an unpleasant color cast. This is a brand new film, so it is to be expected that there are some issues to work out. As-is we probably will not shoot this film again in the future. If Harman releases an updated version we may give it another shot, but we will make sure not to use it on images that need to turn out well on the first try.