Harman Phoenix is now available in 120. That is genuinely worth celebrating, because there are woefully few colour films available in medium format, and a brand new one from a serious manufacturer is a rare and good thing.
The film itself is a mixed bag, and I want to be honest about that. It is unrefined. It is bold, contrasty, heavy on character, and it behaves a bit like the experimental colour films from a certain other manufacturer. It is fun to shoot but it is not a refined, high-quality colour film in the way that Portra or the much-missed Pro 400H are. What I am most excited about is not Phoenix itself but what Phoenix represents: the first step in Harman building a colour film line.
This is the original Phoenix review. There is now a Phoenix 2 review on the site as well, which covers the improved second version. Read both if you are deciding whether to buy. The short version of the relationship: Phoenix 1 is rough, Phoenix 2 is meaningfully better.
Why I waited for 120
I dug my heels in and refused to buy Phoenix in 35mm. Partly because I am a stubborn git, partly because I do not shoot 35mm and was not going to start just to try a film, and partly because I suspected Harman would eventually bring it out in 120 if it sold well enough.
I was right. Michelle from Harman, who I had spoken to at the photography show, got in touch a few months ago to say it was happening and offered me a few rolls to test. I said yes. They sent them, which was kind of them.
A detail worth knowing: the 120 version is the same emulsion as the 35mm version. Harman are tweaking the emulsion slightly with each production run (fixing small errors, refining as they go) but saving any genuinely new emulsion for the eventual follow-up film. So this is the same Phoenix that 35mm shooters have been using, just in a wider format.
What changes between 35mm and 120
The main difference between any film in 35mm versus 120 is grain, and it works in a way some people misunderstand.
When you put the same emulsion on a larger piece of film, the grain does not get bigger. The grain particles are the same size. But they are spread across a larger area, which means that when you enlarge the negative to a given print size, you are enlarging the 120 negative less than you would the 35mm negative to reach the same print. Less enlargement means the grain is less visible in the final image.
So Phoenix in 120 has the same grain structure as 35mm but appears finer and less imposing in prints. In my testing, the grain on the 120 version was almost pleasant when the film was exposed correctly. Definitely not the imposing grain that some 35mm Phoenix shooters have reported.
Test one: confetti fields
The first outing was to confetti fields, which (my wife informs me) are where they grow flowers to make real petal confetti. Fields and fields of flowers in varying colours. A good test for a colour film.
The British summer weather did its usual thing and rained on me for most of the trip. I got a brief break in the rain and worked a nook in the flowers, doing some portraits of my kids among the blooms. Set up a flash with an orange filter to add some warmth and fake a bit of sun poking through the clouds.
First impressions matched what everyone else has said about Phoenix: high contrast, punchy colours, bold character. But I was slightly taken aback by how it handled some of the colours. There were strange things happening, particularly some odd colour behaviour around my daughter’s glasses that I cannot fully explain. The colours felt a bit errant at times.
I developed in Fuji Hunt C-41 chemistry. It is possible the emulsion is more sensitive to small variations in development than a more refined film would be, or that there is a colour shift with under or over exposure that I was running into. Either way, the colours were not always predictable.
![PLACEHOLDER: a portrait of one of my kids in the confetti fields, showing Phoenix’s bold colour and contrast]
The overall impression from the first roll: not unpleasant, but bold in a slightly cheap way. I wondered, uncharitably, whether it might pair well with a Holga, the logic being that a rough-and-ready film might suit a rough-and-ready camera.
Test two: the Holga (a mistake)
So I tried it. A roll of Phoenix in a Holga (one of my daughter’s pink Holgas, because I prefer how her Holgas render to my newer black one) on a beach in Cornwall. Holga plus beach plus sun plus a bold colour film: in theory a match made in heaven, the film doing exactly what it was built for.
It was not a match made in heaven. It was a mistake.
What I learned is that doubling up on rough-and-ready does not give you something characterful, it gives you something muddy. A rough-and-ready camera plus a rough-and-ready film equals double rough-and-ready, and I am not into that aesthetic in the first place. The Holga softness and the Phoenix roughness compounded each other rather than complementing each other. The frames did not work.
This taught me something useful about Phoenix that informed the rest of the testing: this film does not want to be roughed up further. It wants the opposite.
![PLACEHOLDER: a Holga frame on Phoenix from the Cornwall beach, showing the muddy double-rough-and-ready effect]
Test three: a proper studio shoot
What I had wanted to do from the start was give Phoenix everything: high-quality lenses, proper lighting, a controlled environment, and proper exposure. See how it performs when you stop fighting it and give it ideal conditions.
The location was a studio set up in a shipping container office space at SpaceWorks, a colourful little studio complex. The interior happened to have been redesigned for a BBC show, which meant I could only photograph it in specific pockets rather than wide shots, but the colourful 70s-ish vibe of the redesign turned out to be perfect for the film.
I shot with a Bronica ETRS, flash only, working through several lighting setups with the model, Ivy Huxley, who has appeared on the channel before and who sat patiently through the whole session.
The setups:
- Big deep-dish softbox close to Ivy for soft directional light
- Smaller beauty dish reflector for more dramatic, narrower lighting
- Black backdrop with enough flash power and a stopped-down aperture to drop the background to black
- Across-the-container compositions using the colourful walls as backdrops
- Tight face shots with Ivy right under the light
This is where Phoenix came alive. The results from the studio shoot were genuinely fantastic. I would love to claim I had planned the 70s aesthetic to suit the film, but it was a happy accident: I chose the studio because it was colourful, then looked at the redesign and suggested we lean into the 70s vibe. The film, the lighting, the colour palette, and the period feel all came together beautifully.
The Bronica ETRS plus Phoenix, properly lit and properly exposed, worked really well. The yellows and oranges in particular sang.
![PLACEHOLDER: a studio portrait of Ivy under flash, showing how well Phoenix handles the 70s colour palette with proper lighting]
What I learned about how to shoot Phoenix
The three tests together taught me the key thing about this film: Phoenix wants a good camera, good glass, and proper exposure. It is not a film you rough up for character (the Holga proved that). It is a film that, despite its own roughness, needs the camera to fill in the blanks where the film falls a little short.
Give it a precise camera, sharp lenses, controlled light, and accurate exposure, and it rewards you with bold, characterful, genuinely lovely colour images, especially in the warm end of the spectrum. Treat it casually or compound its roughness with a rough camera, and it falls apart.
That is a useful thing to know before you load a roll. Phoenix is not a grab-and-go casual film. It is a film that performs best when you take it seriously.
The honest verdict
Phoenix is a good film. It is not a great film. It is, in a word, unrefined. It feels a bit like the experimental colour stocks from a certain other film supplier, and I am not sure that is quite what Harman is fundamentally about. Their black and white films (the Ilford line) are anything but unrefined, so I know they can make properly refined emulsions.
It is fun to shoot. The studio results with Ivy were fantastic. But it does not overtake my love of the defunct Pro 400H, and I still reach for Portra when I want a reliable colour film for portraits.
What genuinely excites me is the future. Phoenix has always been labelled a limited edition, and Harman’s stated plan is to keep refining it and to produce new colour films based on what they learn from it. The message printed inside the box says sales from this film will allow them to further invest in and refine future colour formulations. If that is true (and Harman’s track record with black and white suggests it is) then this is the beginning of something significant: a serious manufacturer building a colour film line from scratch, at a time when colour film options in 120 are vanishingly few.
That is what I am buying into when I buy Phoenix. Not just the film in my hand, but the films that will come after it.
The colour film situation in 120
Worth putting this in context. Colour negative film in 120 is not a crowded market. You have the Kodak offerings (Portra, Gold, Ektar), the Lomography films, and now Phoenix. That is more or less it. Pro 400H is gone. Fuji has been retreating from film for years.
So every new colour film in 120 is genuinely cause for celebration, almost regardless of how good it is, because the alternative is a market that keeps shrinking. Phoenix arriving, and Harman committing to a colour film programme, is a meaningful counter-trend to the slow disappearance of colour film. That matters more than whether this specific first version is refined.
What is next for me and Phoenix
I deliberately kept a roll back so I would have something to hold while I wrapped up the video, which means I have a spare roll to shoot. I am looking forward to it, probably in the ETRS again, possibly something different. Now that I know how to shoot it (good camera, proper exposure, lean into the warm colours) I expect to get more out of it than I did on the early test rolls.
For the definitive word on where this film line is heading, see the Phoenix 2 review, which covers the improved second version and confirms that Harman are indeed doing exactly what they said they would: refining, improving, and building toward properly good colour film.
Big thanks to Michelle and Harman for the test rolls, and to Ivy for modelling. If you are looking for a model in the Bristol area, she is excellent and her details are in the video description.