Fujifilm Pro 400H vs Kodak Portra 400

Look and color

• Base. “Portra 400 (and every Kodak film) has a warmer base than Fuji 400H”, writes Richard Photo Lab, for which 400H has “a more neutral cool base” E1.
• Greens and blues. Casual Photophile finds 400H “remarkably neutral across the board with an added depth to blue and green” A6, and The Darkroom describes a “cooler look with beautiful magenta and green tones” A10. Reviews of Portra 400 speak of a “warm, natural color palette” B7.
• Skin. For Casual Photophile, Ektar “and to a lesser extent Kodak Portra 400” warm skin up, where 400H “elects for a colder skin tone” A6. Kodak markets Portra’s “spectacular skin tones” B1.
• A fourth layer. 400H had a fourth, cyan-sensitive color layer, which Fujifilm paired with an “optimized interlayer effect” to render colors as the eye perceives them A1. The raw materials for that layer are why Fujifilm stopped making it A2.

Tonality and exposure

• Curves. On the datasheets, both films have long straight curves with no visible shoulder, with slopes in the same range: about 0.5 to 0.6 for 400H, 0.55 to 0.65 for Portra 400 (read from the datasheet graphs) A1 B1.
• Contrast. Reviews disagree: 400H is “mild” for The Darkroom A10, but “more contrasty” for Analog.cafe, in a passage that compares it with Portra 400 A7.
• Overexposure. Both take it well: Casual Photophile puts 400H’s overexposure latitude “beyond even four or five stops over” A6; in another film profile, it writes that Portra 400 can make “astounding images even four stops over” B8. But Richard Photo Lab warns photographers moving from 400H: “DON’T OVEREXPOSE YOUR KODAK FILM!!!”, because “Overexposing increases saturation, and in Kodak films it will make the red tones in the base more prominent” E1.

Which one for what

• 400H is no longer made: Fujifilm stopped 35 mm production and sales on January 14, 2021 A2.
• For photographers who shot it, Richard Photo Lab names “Portra 400 and Portra 800” as “the strongest contenders”, Portra 800 partly because “it tends to render less red tones than Portra 400” E1.
• Fujifilm made 400H for portrait, wedding and fashion work A1; Kodak recommends Portra 400 for portrait, fashion, travel and outdoor photography B1.

Real film, side by side

Richard Photo Lab shows the same portrait from its own push and pull tests on Portra 400, exposed normally and pulled one stop, and on 400H, overexposed two stops and developed normally, both scanned on a Noritsu “for a neutral color balance and neutral density”: “check out how similar they can look without even trying!”, it writes, adding that “certainly differences are perceptible side-by-side” E1. In a video by Braedon Flynn of Film Supply Club, both films were shot on a Contax 645 with an 80 mm lens, metered at 200, in even, back-lit, front-lit, sunset and overcast light; PetaPixel, which relays it, sums up: “The differences can be really subtle, but they’re definitely there.” E2