Silberra COLOR 160
So, a company from St. Petersburg, Russia is making not one, but three new color films? It sounds crazy but it’s true. Now, would I say they’re “making” it? I’m not sure but they’re definitely selling these oddball films, and they’re pretty darn good.
Not a whole lot Is known about Silberra, they’ve been around since 2009 but founded the company in 2017. From the looks of it they make chemistry and sell black and white film. That is until 2021, when they started selling three color emulsions. They currently sell a 50, 100, & 160 speed version of this film. I can’t really tell if they’re suppose to all look similar or different from one another. Regardless, on their site they say “Some photographers say it reminds them of Kodachrome’s colors.” incase you’re new to photography, that’s a really big claim.
Before we get into the nitty gritty, there’s some fun facts regarding this film. Silberra is a relatively small company especially within the film world, and yet, they’re doing things I wish a lot of the bigger company’s would do like using Refurbished 135 cartridges, environmental friendly stuff is always a bonus in my book. Also the 120 rolls are hand rolls as well, which is just really cool. Now as for the film itself, I shot the 160 speed to start, and I gotta say, it’s pretty good. The colors are “tender” as they state on their website; I feel that falls inline with the results we got. It has decent latitude; I had a couple underexposed frames and got these really weird faded yet not shadows. I’ll put an example of that here.
When the exposure was on point, the film looks really pleasant; skin tones look good and the sunny beach photos feel like sunny beach photos. It has a nice warmth to it which caught me off guard because the tint of the actual negative was a kind of a faded/murky version of what Kodak’s Portra negative looks like.
The biggest downside to this film is easily the price. I understand they’re a small company and I’m sure this isn’t the most price affective thing for them to be partially or fully manufacturing but is the film worth 14 dollars? I’d be pressed to say yes, It’s not a gimmick film by any means, it’s good film; but I’d put it much more inline with Kodak’s Gold 200 or Fuji’s C200. Image wise the only issues I ran into was the lacking of latitude in the shadows. I metered my scenes and maybe with this film it’s suggested you slightly overexpose, maybe? I went into this review head first with no research; I didn’t want to be expecting anything in particular. “New” films don’t come around much so when one does come out I like to be as unbiased and honest as possible.
To wrap up this review, I’d say besides all the funny mystery behind it, Silberra Color 160, is a decent film. I think it’s definitely worthy of being on the market; mainly for a photo walk or to throw in a point-n-shoot. Would I say it can hang with the big dogs in the film market today? No not really. However, I did enjoy shooting this stuff. I was especially surprised to see the color of the negative itself, that just added to my curiosity of this film and what exactly it is or who is making, it but I guess that’ll continue to live in my head rent free.
