Boots 200 Color Slide Film: Great Film and Great Value

A very cheap color slide film from Boots gives great colors, and is fantastic when either normally processed or cross processed. Learn more about this film after the jump!

If you live in the UK you will probably know what Boots is. If you’re not from the UK and don’t know what it is, it’s basically a chain of pharmacies, the biggest in the UK, I believe.

Anyway, Boots have and always have developed film and sold film. I have found films of my grandmother’s developed at Boots and photos of me as a child developed at Boots. Boots sells two of their own brand of films, both are colour and both are 200 speed. However, one is color negative and one is color slide, their films are believed to be re-branded Fuji. There films are very cheap; a roll of colour negative is about £5.00 or you can get bags of 5 rolls for £17 and the colour slide is £10 processing paid! Usually, they have 3 for 2 so you can get 3 rolls of slide film for £20 including development.

I will be reviewing the colour slide in this review and the negative in another. This is re-branded Fuji, I believe it to be Fuji Sensia 200, and £10 process paid for a roll of Fuji Sensia is a bargain.

If you have read any of my other reviews you will know I don’t shoot color film. The only time I have was when I shot a roll of Boots colour slide in my Olympus XA. It was the first roll of color I had shot in about 6 months. Though altogether, I have shot 2 rolls of the stuff. My first roll was when I was first getting into film photography and was in an Inovar camera, which I have also reviewed. I xpro-ed that roll as the camera had a plastic lens.

Anyway, as I said above, I first bought a roll of Boots 200 color slide film to shoot in my Inovar camera and X-Pro due to the fact it had a plastic lens. It was the first, only and will be my last roll of xpro-ed film I ever shot, simply because it doesn’t show what the camera is capable of, but what the film is.

So yeah, I picked up a roll of it and re-spooled it into a Boots 200 color negative canister. I shot the roll and got it processed as though it was the colour negative film.

Here are some results:

Though I don’t x-pro I still like the results and the film has a blueish-greenish cast which I really like, It’s one of the more subtle and nicer xpro-ed films I have seen, since it manages to keep the details and make the photos look interesting.

The next roll I picked up, I shot in my Olympus XA. Most of the roll was used for some street photography, and I wanted to take advantage of the processing being paid. So I shot my roll put it in the envelope which came inside the film box, and sent it off. Please note that due to the size of the film canister it has to be sent as a small package came to about £1.30, but £11.30 process paid is a great price for slide film. The film came back about 7 working days later, the negatives came nicely mounted and the negatives were excellently developed, in fact the best I have seen a non-professional lab do.

Here are some results:

As you can see the colours are fantastic, the film has a great dynamic range and is incredibly detailed and sharp. If you compare the two galleries xpro and non-xpro you will see the exact reason I don’t and never will cross process. The xpro-ed one shows what the film does and the non-xproed shows what the fantastic lens on the Olympus XA is capable is rather than just a mass of colour and distractions.

Overall Boots 200 colour slide is a great film, id definitely recommend you pick some up, if it isn’t available in your country, then try Fuji Sensia which is meant to be the re-branded version, but expect to pay more for the Fuji stuff. If you do get some, I would definitely get it developed normally though that’s up to you. As I have stated many times, I dislike cross processing.

Thanks for reading! Keep shooting!

written by brandkow93 on 2012-05-30 #gear #review #colours #boots #iso-200 #lomography #x-pro #color-slide #user-review #contrast-saturation