Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Agfa Vista plus 200 is an inexpensive C41 film (approx $2.50 per roll of 36 exposures) but don’t let the price fool you it’s actually a really good film.  For most of the images the colour was very accurate it only had trouble reproducing some reds particularly the red wildflowers.  I can’t really eliminate my V700 scanner from the equation so it could play a small factor in that and the film is also said to be geared towards natural skin tone reproduction so that also could play a part in the rendering of the reds..  Here are a couple of colour mixing charts that I shot with Agfa Vista plus 200 (seen on the left) and my Pentax K-3 DSLR (on the right).  I also found that the colours had a muted pastel look that sometimes required a little extra saturation during post processing.  If you want image perfection you shouldn’t be shooting film anyway but if you want the look of film and you want it cheap this film is perfect.

The Sillette Record is now almost 50 years old so it somewhat amazes to me that the selenium meter works as well as it does.  I kept comparing it’s measurements against my Nikon P7000 and it came to a point where I felt I could just trust the meter in this camera and dispense with the double check.  The meter itself  has no effect on the shutter speed or aperture but by centering the needle either on the top plate window or through the nice viewfinder display you will have a correct exposure. 

 The focus though is of the zone variety which requires too much thinking I think.  Zone focusing works to a degree when you use smaller apertures that give enough depth of field to hide errors in your ability to guess distances but when you use large apertures such as the cameras maximum f2.8 it is unforgiving.  Of course you can select distances other than the preset icon distances but it requires turning the camera over to look at the scale on the bottom of the lens, not a quick way to focus and this still relies on your ability to guess the actual distance.  The location of the shutter release is also unusual as it is on the side of the lens which forces a different grip compared to the more traditional top right location.

 The lens is not that great when shooting wide open but is adequate when stopped down to about f5.6.  The out of focus areas in images are rendered quite busily so I think this cameras greatest asset is its utilitarian design,  I do like the way it looks.  One final point is the film mask has rounded corners as you can see in this scan it’s one more thing that makes shooting with a camera like this so unique.