Film Stock Review Kodak Portra 400 vs. Kodak Portra 800

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A History of Kodak Portra

Kodak Portra film stock was originally introduced in 1998 as a professional color negative film used for portrait and wedding photography. When the film was first created, it was offered in speeds of 160, 400, and 800, and since then Kodak has introduced new qualities and capabilities, while continuously keeping these three film speeds in their lineup.  Along with the diverse set of film speeds, Kodak also had variations of Portra 160 and Portra 400 at the time, which were previously known as “natural color” (NC) or “vivid color” (VC) varieties.

The film stock’s first upgrades and changes began in 2006 when Kodak decided they wanted to enhance the scanning performances and improve their grain qualities. While the changes in 2006 were minimal, many professional analog photographers took notice of their improvements and began picking up Portra as one of their go-to film stocks.

In 2010, Kodak continued to make more changes and implement new improvements to their prized film stock, Portra 400. They began by introducing a new version of the 400 stock which ultimately replaced the natural color and vivid color varieties. The newest version at the time, which featured a number of technological advances from the Kodak Vision line of motion picture films, was rated at a finer grain, it improved sharpness over the previous Portra 400, and it improved the natural rendering of skin tones. In addition to these incredible upgrades, Kodak also boosted their scanning performance and merged the natural color and vivid color variations . The decision for this upgrade to merge the two variations was made by Kodak and based on the assumption that the majority of prints are made for digital scans. Prior to the digital era of photography, the two variations were used to address different levels of contrast and color saturation for printing, but once digital became the social standard, Kodak made the executive decision to merge the films and let the photographer do their printing adjustments using digital softwares.

The last update in our recent history occurred in 2011, when Kodak updated their Portra 160 series. The same updates that were implemented to Portra 400 in 2010 were now being made for Portra 160 and although Kodak was stopping the production of the variety of these films (NC & VC), they were now producing the highest quality stock showing that quality always comes before quantity.

2010 Portra 400 upgrade

Kodak introduced a new version of the Portra 400 film which replaced the NC and VC versions in late 2010. The new film incorporates a number of technological advances from the Kodak Vision line of motion pictures films. Kodak lists finer grain, improved sharpness over 400 NC and naturally rendered skin tones as some of the improvements over the existing NC and VC line.

Kodak also lists improved scanning performance as a feature, but the film still retains an orange mask for optical printing. The «NC» and «VC» varieties of the film were introduced to address the need for different levels of contrast and color saturation when printing, and adjusting these image attributes tend to be more difficult with traditional color darkroom printing than with digital imaging. This has influenced a decision to merge the two varieties of the film based on the assumption that most prints are currently made from digital scans which allow for these adjustments to be carried out digitally.