There are three major names that most film photographers associate with 35mm color negative: Kodak, Fuji, and — if they were shooting in the late 1990s or had access to the right camera shops — Konica. The first two are still coating film. The third has not existed as a photography company for nearly two decades. Its film stock is genuinely extinct. There is no factory anywhere in the world producing Konica emulsions, no plan to resume, and no spiritual successor carrying the torch under a different name.

We have a small batch of Konica VX100 Super in Film Fridge — the same stock in both 24- and 36-exposure cassettes. What follows is context for that stock: who Konica was, what the VX100 Super actually is, how the company's exit from photography was more abrupt and more total than either Kodak's or Fuji's cutbacks, and what a cold-stored roll looks like when you rate it at ISO 50 and put it through C-41 in 2026.

Cherry blossoms, cherry cameras

Konica was older than Kodak.

The company traces its origins to 1873, when a Tokyo pharmacist named Rokusaburo Sugiura began selling photographic materials out of his family's shop, Konishiya Rokubei, in Kojimachi. George Eastman would not found the Eastman Dry Plate Company for another eight years. By the time Kodak existed as a brand, Sugiura had already established Konishi Honten in Nihonbashi and was importing cameras, plates, and chemistry from Europe and the United States.

In 1902, Konishi founded a manufacturing division called Rokuoh-sha to produce its own photographic plates and printing paper. The following year, Rokuoh-sha released the Cherry Hand Camera — Japan's first branded, mass-produced camera. The Cherry was a simple plate camera, but it marked the beginning of an indigenous Japanese camera industry that would, within a few decades, rival and then surpass the European manufacturers who had dominated the field.

The company's film and paper products were sold under the Sakura brand — the Japanese word for cherry blossom, chosen for the same reason the Cherry camera bore its name. Sakura remained the consumer-facing film brand through the early 1980s.

In 1940, Konishiroku announced Sakura Natural Color Film — Japan's first domestically produced color film, a reversal emulsion modeled after Kodachrome but engineered to avoid Kodak's patents by using a different exposure-control method during processing. It arrived five years after Kodachrome and just before the Pacific War restricted its distribution to military and news use. The film was a technical milestone — Japan's national museum of science and technology later designated it as a significant piece of scientific heritage.

By the postwar decades, the company had grown into a full-service photographic manufacturer: cameras, lenses, film, paper, minilabs, and processing chemistry. In 1984, Konishiroku formally adopted the name Konica worldwide, replacing the Sakura brand on its film products. The Cherry cameras were half a century gone, but the institutional knowledge — how to coat emulsions, how to design dye couplers, how to build a color film from the silver halide up — was deep and continuous.

The VX generation

Konica's color negative films through the 1980s and early 1990s followed a steady generational cadence: SR in the mid-1980s, SR-V in 1987, SR-G in 1989, Super SR in 1991, Super XG in 1993. Each generation brought incremental improvements in grain, color fidelity, and latitude — the same arms race that Kodak was running with Gold and Fuji with Superia, all three companies fighting for shelf space in the same camera shops and drugstore film aisles.

In 1999, Konica launched two new lines simultaneously: Centuria, aimed at the professional and enthusiast market, and VX, targeting the consumer tier. Both lines incorporated emulsion technologies that Konica had originally developed for Advanced Photo System (APS) films — the JX series — and adapted for 35mm:

• JX-Crystal — a refined silver halide crystal structure that reduced grain size by roughly 30 percent compared to the previous Super XG generation while maintaining sensitivity.
• JX-Coupler — an advanced dye coupler with approximately double the reactivity of the previous generation, allowing more efficient dye formation per unit of silver. The result was improved color saturation and better latent image stability, meaning exposed rolls held their image quality longer before processing.
• SISS (Simulated Ideal Spectral Sensitivity) — a design approach that optimized the spectral response of each emulsion layer to approximate an ideal sensitivity curve, improving color accuracy under mixed and difficult lighting conditions.

The VX100 Super was the 100-speed anchor of the consumer VX line. Daylight balanced, DX-coded, standard C-41 process. Konica's own marketing described it as delivering "natural color balance under the most demanding lighting situations, including backlighting, fluorescent light, and electronic flash" — the sort of language that sounds like boilerplate until you actually shoot the film and notice that the color holds together under fluorescent tubes in a way that some of its competitors struggled with.

In practice, the VX100 Super has a color palette that sits in its own space — neither the warm, amber-shifted rendering of Kodak Gold nor the cool, high-saturation greens of Fuji Superia. It is a balanced emulsion: faithful skin tones, clean midtone transitions, and a saturation level that feels punchy without tipping into artificial. If Kodak Gold is a warm afternoon and Fuji Superia is a bright, slightly green morning, VX100 Super is a clear, even noon — present, vivid, and honest.

The merger and the end

The digital transition hit the three major film manufacturers at roughly the same time, but their responses diverged sharply. Kodak stumbled but survived as a film manufacturer. Fuji diversified into cosmetics and medical imaging while maintaining a reduced film line. Konica's trajectory was different: faster, more abrupt, and more final.

In January 2003, Konica and Minolta announced their intent to merge. By August 2003, the holding company Konica Minolta Holdings, Inc. was formed. The merger was driven less by photographic ambitions than by the companies' shared business in office equipment — copiers, printers, and document solutions — where they saw synergies that could sustain them through the digital transition.

Photography was already a declining segment for both companies. Their combined film and camera divisions were losing money against a digital market dominated by Canon, Sony, and Nikon. The calculus was simple: the holding company would concentrate on its profitable core and shed the rest.

On January 19, 2006, Konica Minolta issued two press releases on the same day. The first announced the transfer of all digital SLR camera assets — including the A-mount lens system, sensor technologies, and design capabilities — to Sony. The second announced the complete withdrawal from the photo imaging business: all camera production would cease by March 31, 2006, and all color film and photographic paper production would end by March 31, 2007.

The language of the film announcement was blunt. Konica Minolta acknowledged that it had "produced Japan's first photographic paper in 1903, and Japan's first color film in 1940, thus pioneering joy of photography for more than a century." In the next sentence it noted that "in today's shrinking photographic market... it is quite difficult to maintain profitability in this field." The decision was made. Film coating lines would wind down. Chemistry production would stop. Sales offices would close.

In late 2006, Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) acquired what remained of Konica Minolta's photochemical manufacturing operations — the organic and inorganic chemistry businesses — but not to continue making consumer film. The acquisition was for industrial materials. The emulsion recipes, the coating specifications, the institutional knowledge of how to build a Konica color negative film — all of it was effectively retired.

There was no protracted decline, no reduced product line, no desperate reformulation to cut costs. One day Konica Minolta was a company with a 130-year photographic heritage. The next day it was an office equipment company. The exit was as clean and as complete as any in the history of the medium.

What the VX100 Super is not

It is worth being precise about what this film represents, because the expired-film market is full of imprecise claims.

VX100 Super is not a professional emulsion. It is not Centuria, which was Konica's professional line. It is a consumer film — the mass-market product that sat on pharmacy shelves and in camera shop bargain bins alongside Kodak Gold and Fuji Superia. It was priced to compete at the consumer tier and it was engineered for the consumer use case: load and forget, meter in auto, drop at a one-hour lab.

That is not a weakness. Consumer films are engineered for latitude and forgiveness. They are designed to produce acceptable-to-good results across a wide range of metering errors, lighting conditions, and processing variables, because the average consumer shooter was not spot-metering and was not choosing their lab carefully. The VX100 Super has wide exposure latitude precisely because it was built for people who needed it to work.

For photographers shooting it deliberately today, that latitude is an asset. It means the film handles overexposure gracefully, holds shadow detail well, and tolerates the kind of minor metering inaccuracies that are inevitable when shooting twenty-year-old expired film through mechanical cameras.

Our batch, tested at ISO 50

The VX100 Super we sell carries a boxed expiry of July 2005, which places it in the final generation of Konica consumer film production — manufactured in Japan, at Konica's emulsion coating facilities, likely sometime in 2003 or 2004. The rolls have been cold stored since acquisition.

We have tested this batch extensively. The headline result: rate it at ISO 50.

At box speed (ISO 100), the film produces usable but slightly thin negatives with compressed shadow detail — consistent with the roughly two decades of sensitivity loss since manufacture. At ISO 50, the negatives are substantially better: full shadow detail, rich midtone density, and clean color separation across the frame. The overexposure is well within the film's latitude envelope and the results are the kind of thing you could hand to a lab with confidence.

The color character at ISO 50 is excellent. Skin tones are warm without being orange. Greens are vivid without the cyan push that Fuji emulsions sometimes introduce. Reds hold their hue rather than drifting toward magenta. There is a slight warmth overall — not the amber warmth of Kodak Gold, but a gentle, golden quality that reads as natural daylight rather than as a color cast. The grain is fine enough to be invisible at normal viewing distances on a well-exposed frame.

We offer a DX re-encoding service for this stock. The factory DX code reads ISO 100, which means cameras with DX auto-sensing will meter at box speed and produce the slightly thin results described above. We can re-encode the DX barcode to ISO 50, so your camera meters at the speed we recommend. The service is $1.00 per roll and is available as an add-on at checkout.

Shooting notes

Process as standard C-41. Any lab that runs C-41 can develop this film. No special instructions, no modified chemistry, no conversation with the technician. The same line that processes Portra and Gold will process VX100 Super.

Meter at ISO 50. This is our tested recommendation for this batch. If you prefer to bracket, shoot a frame at 50 and one at 100 on the same subject and see which negative you prefer. The latitude is wide enough that both will produce an image, but the ISO 50 frame will have noticeably more shadow information and richer overall density.

Daylight is ideal. The film is daylight balanced and at its best in open, natural light. It handles overcast conditions well — the latitude covers the lower contrast range without difficulty. Indoor and tungsten-lit scenes will shift warm, as with any daylight-balanced color negative, but C-41 scanning workflows handle this routinely.

Expect good color. The most common reaction from photographers who shoot this stock for the first time is surprise at how clean and vivid the results are. There is a persistent assumption that expired consumer film will produce washed-out, heavily shifted images. Cold-stored VX100 Super does not do that. The colors are present, the grain is controlled, and the contrast is balanced. It looks like a good color negative film, because it is one.

Handle the cassette normally. The rolls are DX-coded, long-leader, and standard in every mechanical respect. Load, shoot, rewind, process. Nothing unusual.

A curatorial note

Every roll of Konica VX100 Super that exists in the world was manufactured by a company that no longer makes film, in factories that no longer coat emulsions, using chemistry that is no longer produced. There is no new old stock pipeline. There is no bulk supply sitting in a warehouse. When the remaining cold-stored inventory is gone — ours and everyone else's — the emulsion is gone.

That finality gives the stock a different weight than a roll of Kodak Gold or Fuji C200, both of which are still in production and available at any camera shop. Shooting a roll of VX100 Super is, in a small way, shooting the last work of a 130-year photographic lineage that began with a pharmacist selling imported plates in Meiji-era Tokyo and ended with a press release in January 2006.

We have it in Film Fridge in both 24- and 36-exposure rolls. When it's gone, we'll look for more — but the supply is finite and getting smaller. That's the nature of the stock.

Further reading:

• Konica VX-S100 Datasheet (PDF) — Original Konica specifications
• Analogue Photo Lab: A few shots with Konica Minolta VX-100 — Sample images and brief history

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Konica VX100 Super is available in Film Fridge while supplies last.