The first roll of Original Wolfen Color NC500

I finally managed to test the newly available colour film from ORWO – the Color NC500.

Let’s keep it short and sweet — ORWO is a brand built on top of what was left of the East German part of Agfa. Agfa factories were located in Wolfen, a city that was located in what was known as East Germany, and ORWO is shortened for “Original Wolfen”. The company didn’t survive the 1990s but was revived by a new company in recent years. But, enough of a history lesson, let’s keep that for some future article.

NC500 is a brand-new film emulsion and is one of the very few brand-new film emulsions — next to Adox Color Mission and Harman Phoenix films. But also different — NC500 looks more refined than experimental Adox and Harman films.

The film has a decidedly muted colour palette, somewhat similar to Lomography’s LomoChrome Metropolis, but this film keeps the look significantly more natural and balanced. Despite low colour saturation, the film looks pleasantly natural.

I shot a roll under reasonably good, summer light conditions in a Pentax MZ-S camera with an excellent multi-segment metering system. It was developed in a local lab and scanned as usual, with Plustek OpticFilm 8100 film scanned and VueScan.