Fujifilm Velvia 100 - 35mm Colour Slide Film
The saturated one. It has never much cared whether you were ready for it.
Thirty years on, Velvia is still the film people mean when they say a photograph looks like a photograph.
Fujifilm Velvia 100 35mm Film, known to Fuji as RVP 100, is an ISO 100 daylight-balanced colour slide film and one of the most recognisable emulsions ever made. New generation cyan, magenta and yellow couplers give it Fuji's claim to the highest colour saturation available, matched to an RMS granularity of 8 that puts it among the finest grained films at this speed. It requires E-6 processing, not C-41. In stock now and shipping fast from the UK. DX coded, 36 exposures.
What Makes Fujifilm Velvia 100 Habit-Forming
Important: Velvia 100 Requires E-6 Processing Chemical Dependency Lab currently processes B&W and C-41 colour negative film only, though E-6 is in development and coming soon, so watch this space. In the meantime, our friends at Not Quite North in Lincoln offer a mail-in E-6 service for both 24 and 36 exposure rolls. Find their E-6 service at not-quite-north.co.uk. Once it is developed, send the slides to us and we will scan and print them.
The Saturation Velvia Is Known For Fuji claim the world's highest level of colour saturation for this film, achieved through new generation couplers, and it is the reason Velvia built its reputation on landscape work in the 1990s. Greens and reds go beyond documentary accuracy into something closer to how you remember a scene than how it measured. Foliage, autumn colour and low sun are where that pays off. Against Velvia 50 the saturation and contrast are marginally subtler, which makes the 100 the more usable of the two for anything with a person in it.
Ultra-Fine Grain An RMS granularity of 8 places Velvia 100 alongside Provia 100F and Astia 100F as one of the finest grained films in its speed class. On a lightbox or in a high resolution scan there is essentially nothing to see.
Exposure: There Is No Margin This is the practical note that matters most. Slide film gives you roughly a stop of usable latitude where colour negative gives you five, and Fuji rate this one at plus or minus a third of a stop. Expose for the highlights and let the shadows go where they go. Plenty of photographers rate it slightly slower than box speed. A handheld incident meter earns its keep here more than on any negative stock, and bracketing in difficult light is not an admission of defeat.
Push Processing Velvia 100 pushes one stop with excellent results and little variation, which is useful when the light drops and you are committed to the roll.
Colour That Lasts Fuji rate its colour image stability as equal to RVP 100F, so the slides you file away should still look like themselves in a few decades. Given that the point of transparency is holding the original up to the light, that matters more here than it does with negatives.
A Note on Supply Fujifilm withdrew Velvia 100 from the United States in 2021 over an EPA restriction on a trace chemical in the emulsion, and the wider Fujifilm film range has been contracting since. It remains available here, but this is not a stock to assume will always be on the shelf. It's hard to get hold of.
DX Coded, 36 Exposures DX coded for ISO 100 in automatic cameras.
Best For Landscape, nature and travel photography in good light, and any work where you want colour with real force behind it. It is not a portrait film in the conventional sense and it will not flatter skin the way a negative stock does, though it is more forgiving in that respect than Velvia 50. It rewards photographers who meter carefully and punishes those who do not, visibly and immediately. Once it has been developed elsewhere, send the slides to us for scanning and printing, and consider a print rather than a screen. Transparency is the one format where paper genuinely competes with holding the original up to a window.
Perfect for: Landscape and nature photographers who want maximum colour, experienced shooters comfortable with unforgiving exposure, anyone who wants to project or lightbox their work, and anyone whose dependency has reached the point of owning a loupe.
Velvia has been dividing photographers since the 1990s, and the arguments are always the same. Too saturated, too contrasty, too much. That is rather the point. It was never built to describe a scene faithfully, it was built to make a landscape look the way it felt at the time. Meter it properly, shoot it in good light, and hold the result up to a window. The argument tends to settle itself at that moment.
If you want the other side of the slide film argument, we also stock Kodak Ektachrome E100, which is considerably more restrained.