Accurate Colors and Extreme Sharpness, Its Fantastic
Written: May 22 '01 (Updated Apr 20 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Accurate color capture, lively greens, and vivid blues. Sharp.
Cons: Reds too saturated, overall saturation not as great as lets say Superia.
The Bottom Line: Fuji Reala offers superb color accuracy and sharpness. Its best used under sunny conditions, and overexposed a little to help with color saturation.
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| soothsayer's Full Review: Fuji Superia Reala 100 135-24, 100 ASA (CS13524) |
I’m not too serious a photographer, I tinker some, not a lot. I normally shoot Fuji Superia 100 because it gives me very good results, and a roll is not too expensive. However, when I needed to shoot something near and dear to me, or when I needed film with a little something extra, I use Fuji Reala.
Fuji Reala is really a great film for outdoors use and portraiture. Few films can match its extreme sharpness, and superb color accuracy, especially in the blue range. Kodak comes close, but Fuji is better. One of the Fuji’s secrets is 4th color layer technology. According to the product literature, the 4th product layer offers faithful color, and its ability to capture true color even under florescent light. Well, I’m not so sure about the florescent part, but I know that bright sunny conditions and bright indoor lightning works wonders.
Tests:
The strength of Fuji Reala is its ability to faithfully capture colors. Color saturation at its default iso 100 speed is good, but not great. Shooting it at 64-80 asa, with no change in development time can improve saturation. That means overexposing the film 1/3 to 2/3 stops. If you cannot override your camera’s film speed detector, forget what I just said.
I shot a few rolls of this film in mostly bright sunny conditions at 64 asa using a Nikon 105mm f/2.5, and a 50mm f/1.4 prime lenses. I brought the rolls to a photo lab to have them developed and printed. They printed 4x6 snapshots on Agfa paper.
Results:
The pictures I received back had a delicious snap to them. I saw extremely natural, and realistic colors. The greens, and blues were vivid and saturated much better than Fuji Superia. The reds, however, stood out like a sore thumb. When I took a picture of red flowers and people in red t-shirts, the red was saturated to the point that it looked like blobs painted onto the photo.
Shadow detail was good, but the highlights were washed out. Flesh tones were realistic, although not too saturated as I had hoped, maybe because the sun was shining too much on the subjects? As for grain, I didn’t see a speck of grain.
Overall:
For bright sunny outdoors work, this film is excellent. Colors are extremely realistic and vivid. Just shoot it at 64-80asa to improve its saturation. For less than ideal situations involving flat lightning, Superia should be used for its improved saturation.
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Recommended:
Yes
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