I Tried the Cheapest Film on the Internet – Here’s What Happened

Film photography is expensive! Film prices keep going up – “pro” level film is upwards of $25 US a roll, and even “budget film” is $12 or $13 or more. Add $20 or more for processing, and we’re talking some serious money. (I process film at home, which helps a lot.)

In my quest to reduce the cost of film, I recently ventured to AliExpress.com, a web site that offers very low prices on a huge variety of products. I had tried out some other items and found that the quality was good and the shipping was fast (and often free). Confident that web site was legit, I went back and searched for “35mm color film.”

My search brought up a lot of results, but many were for film that required ECN-2 processing, which I don’t do. However, some showed more common color film for C-41 processing. After screening for price and selecting the cheapest option, I ordered a few rolls and waited about a week for the film to arrive.

My order included two different kinds of film, but for now I’ll focus on the cheaper of the two. The film I’m reviewing here sells for $4.20 US per roll when you buy two rolls. Increase your order to ten rolls, and you’ll pay $3.30 US per roll. My order of two rolls with shipping put the per-roll cost at about $6 US.

Pretty cheap, right? Well, there are a few caveats. First, the roll is labeled as “8 Exp,” so you won’t get a lot of shots per roll. Eight exposures is also very generous estimate. I shot the first roll in an Olympus OZ-1 point-and-shoot, a camera that likes to wind a lot of film before the first frame. In that camera, I got a total of five frames; the leader ate up the other three. The second roll was loaded into a Konica Recorder, another point-and-shoot but in this case a half-frame camera. In the Recorder, I got a total of 14 half-frames, equivalent to seven standard images. If you have a camera with a manual winder and you’re careful and start shooting at “0” instead of “1” you can maybe get eight frames, but in general eight exposures is more aspirational that realistic.

So the film length is a bit short, which raises the cost-per-image a bit, but it’s still cheap.

What kind of film is it, and what kind of pictures does it make?

There’s nothing on the canister other that “Color Negative” to indicate what it is, but a quick look at the processed film shows that it is “Eastman 5207,” more commonly known as Vision 250D Color and sold in bulk rolls for use in motion picture cameras. So, basically the same film sold by CineStill and others. (A 36-exposure roll of CineStill goes for about $25 US at one popular UK online store.)

Because it is made for motion picture cameras, Eastman 5207 comes with a black “remjet” coating that captures light after it has passed through the emulsion to prevent it from bouncing back through the film and ruining the image. The film I bought from AliExpress came with the remjet removed, which allows it to be processed easily in C-41 chemicals (I used CineStill’s C-41 two-chemical kit).

One other note: The film canister is marked “DX,” but there is no DX coding on it – just a bar code that your camera can’t read. Not a problem if you use a camera that requires you to set the ISO (the Konica Recorder does), but the vast majority of point-and-shoot or automatic cameras will revert to ISO 100 if they can’t read the DX coding and won’t expose this film properly. For those cameras, you’ll need to hack a DX code or use a  stick-on DX code.

Here are the results. The photos are unremarkable, but they do show the capability of the film. The film was processed in CineStill’s C-41 chemicals and scanned on an Epson V550 using Epson’s scanning software. I tweaked the color balance a bit after scanning, but no more than I would for any film.

I was very pleased with the results, especially given price of the film. The colors and contrast are nice, although the images show the “glow” around light sources common to de-remjetted Eastman 5207 film, which result from light bouncing off the pressure plate in the camera and back through the emulsion (look at the bumper on the Chevy or the light fixtures on the interior shot). A little more unusual is the glow around our poodle, who was brightly lit by the sun against a shadowy background. The grain is nice but not intrusive – keep in mind that these are half-frame images so you’re looking much more closely at the negative than would be the case for a standard camera.

Based on my results from the first two rolls, I have ordered a few more. My latest order with shipping came in at $4.40 US per roll, which makes this a low-cost decision.

I plan to use the next fews in the Konica Recorder, where 14 frames is a reasonable number of pictures to shoot on a day’s outing. There are other sellers on AliExpress that sell what looks like the same film (different packaging) in rolls of up to 36 frames. I have a few of those, which I’ll test. Hit me up in the comments for results from those rolls.

Have You Found a Cheaper Film?

What about you, dear reader? Have you found a cheaper film that’s worth trying? Let us know in the comments!

I shoot a lot of film and sometimes get images worth sharing. See what makes the cut on my Instagram: www.instagram.com/campyonlyguy

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