Optik Oldschool SantaColor 100 - 35mm Colour Negative Film

Kodak aerial survey film, hand spooled and pointed at things much closer to the ground.

Designed to resolve detail from several thousand feet. It turns out that translates rather well to a Tuesday afternoon in town.

Optik Oldschool SantaColor 100 35mm Film is an ISO 100 daylight-balanced colour negative film made from Kodak Aerocolor IV, an emulsion built for aerial mapping and reconnaissance. Manufactured in the USA and hand spooled in Finland. Very fine grain, exceptional sharpness, and usable latitude from ISO 25 to 800. Standard C-41, 36 exposures.

What Makes Optik Oldschool SantaColor 100 Habit-Forming

An Emulsion That Was Never Meant for You

Kodak Aerocolor IV was made for medium and high altitude aerial mapping and reconnaissance work. It reached photographers through a crowdfunding campaign in 2022, and the reasons it had not arrived sooner are worth knowing. Kodak's minimum order came to roughly fifteen thousand rolls, and the film is too thin for standard spooling machinery, so every roll has to be wound by hand. That is a great deal of effort to get an aerial emulsion into a 35mm cassette.

Very Fine Grain, Exceptional Sharpness

A film designed to resolve ground detail from altitude has to be sharp, and this one is. Grain is very fine and detail holds up under scrutiny, which is why it turns up so often in conversations about the sharpest colour negative films currently available.

Punchy Reds, Lush Greens

Saturation sits above Kodak's Portra series without reaching Ektar, and the contrast curve is longer than Ektar's. In practice that means colour with real presence that still holds its shape in the highlights, and a red response that is noticeably strong. Scans tend to come through on the warm side.

Latitude From ISO 25 to 800

This is the characteristic that keeps people buying it. The film gives acceptable results anywhere from ISO 25 to ISO 800 with appropriate pulling or pushing. Rated at 400 and pushed two stops in development it returns accurate colour with almost no visible grain, which is not a trick most emulsions will perform. Tell your lab what you rated it at and the rest follows.

The Base Is Not a Normal Negative Base

The honest complication. This is not a conventional orange-masked colour negative, which is a consequence of its aerial origins rather than a defect. It affects inversion, and scans can come out looking wrong if whoever is doing the inverting treats it like ordinary C-41. The film is fine. The handling needs to know what it is looking at, which is worth bearing in mind when choosing where to send it.

Hand Spooled, With What That Implies

Every roll is wound by hand because machinery cannot handle film this thin. That is part of why it costs what it costs. It also means a little more variation between rolls than you would get from a factory-loaded cassette, which most people accept as the price of the emulsion being available at all.

No Remjet, No Complications

Unlike respooled cine stocks, there is no remjet backing to remove. It goes through standard C-41 at any colour lab without special handling, including ours.

36 Exposures

A full 36-exposure roll in standard 35mm format.

Is SantaColor 100 the same as Elektra, Aeronega or Maverick?

They all come from Kodak Aerocolor IV. What differs is who spools it, what speed they rate it at, how it is packaged and what it costs. We stock four of them because those differences are real even when the emulsion is not.

Flic Film Elektra 100 and Alien Film Aeronega 100 rate it at 100, as this one does. This Is How I Roll Maverick 125 rates it at 125 and comes hand-rolled into a recycled canister with no DX code, so you set the ISO yourself. Given how much latitude the emulsion has, the difference between 100 and 125 matters less here than it would on a less forgiving film. Pick on price, packaging and whose spooling you trust.

Can you push SantaColor 100?

Yes, and it is one of the reasons to buy it. Rate it anywhere from 25 to 800 and pull or push to match. At 400 pushed two stops it comes back with accurate colour and almost no visible grain. Tell us the rating when you send it in, because we cannot see it on the cassette.

Does SantaColor 100 need special processing?

No. There is no remjet layer, so it runs through standard C-41 alongside everything else. The only thing worth flagging to your lab is the rating if you shot it off box speed, and the unusual base, which affects inversion rather than development.

Best For Landscape, travel, street and general daylight photography where sharpness and colour presence matter more than a forgiving meter reading. The latitude makes it unusually versatile for a slow film, so one roll can cover bright midday and dim interiors if you commit to a rating and push accordingly. C-41 development, scanning and printing are available here, and since we know what the base is, we invert it accordingly. Tell us what speed you shot it at.

Perfect for: Photographers who want the sharpest colour negative they can load, anyone drawn to emulsions with an industrial past, shooters who like one film covering several situations through pushing, and anyone whose dependency has reached the stage of finding surveillance film genuinely romantic.

Aerocolor IV has been quietly doing serious work for years while photographers argued about Portra and Ektar. Getting it into a cassette took a crowdfunding campaign, a fifteen thousand roll order and a lot of hand winding, which tells you something about how much people wanted it. Shoot it at box speed for fine grain and strong colour, or rate it at 400 and push it, and either way you get something that does not look much like anything else in the fridge.

The faster stablemate is SantaColor 800, which shares the name and nothing else, and the rest of the range sits in Optik Oldschool.