NEW LUCKY COLOR FILM REVIEW

Lucky officially launched its new color film on July 17 at the 2025 Shanghai Image & Vision Expo. The debut caused quite a stir in the Chinese analog photography community and was widely seen as a fiscal milestone. Leading up to the release, Lucky generated significant hype through a wave of announcements and marketing efforts. However, it seems they underestimated the actual demand.

At the expo, long lines formed as eager photographers waited to purchase the film—only to be told that supplies were extremely limited. Most attendees left empty-handed. That same day, the film went on sale online, but with just over 100 rolls available on the first day, it sold out within seconds.

The film was priced at 59 yuan (around $8.22 USD) per roll, which included shipping, developing, scanning, and printing for all 36 exposures. To put that into context, Kodak ColorPlus costs about $9 USD in China—for the film alone. From this perspective, Lucky’s bundle seems like a great value. However, many Chinese film photographers had hoped that Lucky would sell the film by itself at a lower price—ideally, significantly cheaper than Kodak. After all, two decades ago, Lucky film was consistently the budget-friendly alternative.

Lucky offers free processing, scanning, and printing for its color film.

Lucky stated that the initial production run will be limited to just 10,000 rolls due to the emulsion still being in refinement. They plan to gradually improve the formula and scale up production once all identified issues are resolved.

As an official distributor of Lucky’s black-and-white film, we received no special access or privileges. Like everyone else, we had to purchase the film online in late July. We then tested it in early August using the new Pentax 17 camera—pairing a brand-new film stock with a brand-new camera for a truly exciting combo.

Lucky 200 film has a very strong rendering of red tones. Its performance in cyan and blue is relatively less vibrant compared to red, but still quite decent. This creates a striking contrast with Fujifilm, which is known for its prominent cyan tones. Unlike the yellowish warmth typical of Kodak ColorPlus and GOLD, Lucky 200 delivers a unique, rosy-red tone. The red it presents feels much cleaner and more transparent—among all the films I’ve used, this one renders red the best.

Lucky 200 emphasizes red tones and tends to shift slightly toward red overall. However, in scenes without red, it still performs well across other colors. This aligns with the old saying from decades ago: “Kodak is yellow, Fuji green, Lucky red.”

The grain of Lucky 200 is moderate—better than Kodak ColorPlus 200, but not quite as fine as the Japan-made Fujifilm C200. Please note that we shot it with a half frame camera, so the grains are bigger than they should be. When scanned with a Noritsu 600 magepixels, details remain visible. With higher-resolution scanning, even more detail could be captured. 

As for dynamic range, I find Lucky 200 to be sufficiently tolerant—the highlights and shadows retain detail in post-processing, with no significant issues. However, it’s worth noting that 200 performs best under daylight conditions, which is also indicated on the packaging. Under cloudy skies or indoor lighting, the colors tend to look dull and grayish, so its versatility is somewhat limited.

The negatives are marked with “Lucky 200T” next to the sprocket holes. The “T” doesn’t stand for “tungsten”—it stands for “testing.” Lucky has stated that this first batch is essentially a beta version. The film was manually coated, and they plan to switch to a large-scale coating machine only after the emulsion formula has been improved.

One noticeable defect with this batch, due to the manual coating process, is the presence of tiny white and blue dots on many frames. Lucky has acknowledged the issue and promised that it will be resolved once they move to machine coating in future batches.

All things considered, the newly re-released Lucky 200 is a solid film option.

(Please note that Lucky color film is only available in China now. But it will be available in REFLX LAB once Lucky is ready to sell it overseas.)

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