Ektar 100 pushed to 400

Kodak Ektar 100 was introduced in 2008 and shouldn’t be confused with the earlier Ektar that was available from 1989 to 1994. Kodak claims that Ektar is the finest grain colour negative film available and I have no doubt that it is. This is an example of the film shot at its native sensitivity of 100 ISO

While the image itself may not be the sharpest there is very little evidence of the film grain itself.
additionally I have found that Ektar has a great degree of exposure latitude that is it can capture a lot of detail both in image highlights and shadows without the need to sacrifice one or the other. This is a feature of film and it’s non linear exposure curve but especially so for Ektar 100.
With all this in mind ‘Fine Grain’,’great latitude’ and its scanability I thought I would try pushing it to 400 ISO as a test. What this entailed was changing from the default ISO of 100 to 400 on my camera which is the same as under exposing the film by 2 stops. Additionally I pushed the processing (Increased the development time) to account for this. The result is that you have a film that you can use for lower light conditions but what are the trade offs? Well the result is that the grain becomes more pronounced and there is an increase in contrast, additionally I found a loss of detail in the shadows and a colour shift towards magenta

So how does this compare to films with a native sensitivity of 400 such as Kodak Portra and Fuji Superia? Well I would say it doesn’t quite match up it’s more like using out of date Kodak 200. Not all of my testing results matched up because I found it necessary to under expose even a little more under the low light conditions that I had but when exposed properly at 400 ISO it’s a viable alternative in a pinch.