I bought two rolls of Fuji Pro 400H a few years ago, and they remained in the freezer until this summer. To be honest, I had forgotten about them until I inventoried my film stock. I can’t recall why I bought this film other than to try it out–no enthusiastic reviews come to mind. When loading the XD5, my goal was to capture wall art, much of which was in shaded areas, so I wanted a 400 ISO film. However, it was also sunny, so I needed a film that could handle shade and bright sun. Portra 400 handles bright scenes well, but UltraMax and Fuji X-tra 400 do not, especially when the sky takes up a significant portion of the frame. Both UltraMax and Fuji 400 X-tra produce grainy images under those conditions. With this in mind, I took a few images backlit by the sky to see how the Pro 400H would perform.
Overall, the Fuji Pro 400H performed exceptionally well. I took the image of the clouds and lamppost specifically to see how grainy the result would be. It seems to have less grain than UltraMax and X-tra 400, performing more like Portra 400. The shadows seem a tad blue in some frames, but that might be from the scanner.
In all, I like its color fidelity as it appears neutral to me, like Ultramax. Purple seems to be the color that trips up CMOS digital sensors and some color film, but here, the purple petunias came out fine. The red rose also came out quite nicely without the need for EC. I really like these results because my scanner adjustments consisted only of the standard histogram settings to prevent clippings of highlights and shadows. Apple Photos, my editing software, was used to fix the white balance on the robot image and to remove two artifacts from the cloud image. All others are unaltered from the scanner.
In general, I have shied away from Fuji color film because it curls so badly. Oddly, the Pro 400H did not. I regret not having bought more 35mm rolls. Luckily, I did grab a few packs of the 120, and they will find their way to the Pentax 645.
Also down to one in my XD7 (ie XD11) and one in the freezer from the dozen or so I bought when they were discontinued. Very good film. Time moves on, at least we have Portra, albeit expensive.
The Pro 400H is cooler and I like this tonality for some shots. I wish I had used some back when I bought it. Yes, thankfully, Porta is still with us. When I think about it, I’ve only shot two rolls of Porta 400 since jumping into photography in 2019. I shot one roll in 2019 and one this summer. The remaining rolls have been frozen since 2019. I’ve used their cheaper cousins, but I’m beginning to see why Pro 400H and Portra 400 cost more.