The Infrared XA2 Experiment - Film Options

Notice! This post is part of a series about shooting an Olympus XA2 with Infrared Flash. If this is the first page you are visiting on the subject of infrared blash, it may be beneficial to start with the summary post of the series.

So far during my great Infrared XA2 experiment, I've been relying on Rollei Infrared 400 film for all of my testing. I chose Rollei Infrared simply it is currently the most inexpensive infrared film that is still in production. Since I feel that I've worked out the technical kinks, and have had a successful shoot using the Rollei Infrared 400, I figured that it was time to see if any better results could be achieved by using one of the more expensive infrared films with the Olympus XA2. For this round of expermientation went and purchased a roll of each of the four infrared films current available through Freestyle, and decided to take them out for a head to head competition on Halloween night.

Rollei Infrared 400

Price: $6.49 single roll. $5.99 each if you purchase ten at a time. $5.49 if you shell out for twenty at once.

Remarks: At $5.49-$6.49 per roll, this is by far the cheapest film of the bunch. For my Halloween shoot, Rollei Infrared 400 was the first roll that I shot so that I could establish a baseline that the other infrared films would be judged against.

Efke IR820 & Efke IR820 Aura

Price: $9.99 per roll.
Remarks: Stay away!

Not only do the Efke films cost four dollars more per roll than Rollei Infrared 400, they also aren't sensitive enough to record a decent image with the Olympus A16 flash. Only a few frames from each of these films had a faint image on them. And by faint, I mean unusably faint. Nothing which could be recovered with push processing or Photoshop.

Efke IR820 is probably a great film for typical infrared use, but for my use, it just didn't cut it. Not to say it can't be done though. Check out the set Infrared by Ryan Carmody over on Flickr. He is getting perfectly usable infrared flash images with Aura. It is pretty much certain that he is also using a flash a much higher output than the Olympus A16 flash that I am using. However, since I really don't want to pay ten dollars per roll to shoot like this, I'm cool with the A16's output being insufficient for Efke IR820.

Ilford SFX 200

Price: $7.99 per roll.
Remarks This is the film for which the SFX A filter that I'm using to cover the flash was designed to be used with, so I had high hopes for getting great results from it.

In terms of tonality, I think that the SFX 200 looks really nice, and it may have the edge over the Rollei film in this aspect. However, I also do not believe that the difference in appearance is worth two dollars more per roll. Take a look at the images below and tell me if you feel the same? I also have a sneaking suspicion that I may just be suffering from a form of Leica Syndrome where I want to see better performance from it since it cost more.

Top three images from the roll of Rollei Infrared 400

Top three images from the roll of Ilford SFX 200

Both rolls of film where developed with Kodak HC-110 Dilution H. Images are a result of direct negative scans which have gone though the same post processing methods as every image which appears on this web site. A few additional photographs from the Halloween shoot can be found here on my Flickr site.

After doing this experiment, I feel that Rollei Infrared 400 is the winner for Infrared Flash use with an Olympus XA series of camera, and is the film that I will stock up on.

PS for samh: Sarah told me to say hi.