Sensia 200 – Fuji's Forgotten Slide Film

What a bargain.

Film on hand, and my new Canon P ready to be taken for a spin - I decided to hit the road to the rural Queensland town of Allora. Allora has a population of 1205 and sits between Toowoomba and Warwick on the New England Highway. It’s also where Mary Poppins author, P.L Travers grew up.

A cold, yet bright and sunny Sunday morning drifted into a cloudy and rainy afternoon - giving me an opportunity to put Sensia through its paces in terms of lighting conditions.

Fujifilm is known for its lineup of iconic professional slide films, Velvia, Provia, Astia and various others. But often left out of the conversation is the -ia suffixed consumer grade slide film, Sensia.

Sensia was available in 100, 200 and 400 ISO from 1994 up until 2010 when Fujifilm suddenly pulled production due to ‘increasing production costs and decreased demand’

I’m not exactly sure what the difference is between ‘professional’ and ‘consumer’ slide films. On the face of it, Sensia is only available in 35mm - if you shoot medium or large format film then you’re out of luck. A bit of internet research points to the professional films offering finer, sharper grain than Sensia. On the other hand, forum threads and blog posts point to the consumer film as more forgiving in terms of exposure latitude, with greater resilience to ambient storage

Now 16 years discontinued, Sensia is hard to find at a good price – particularly from a seller that can attest to cold chain continuity for the past decade and a half.

So I was pretty surprised when I came across a listing of 10 rolls for $73 AUD, frozen since purchase.That’s $7.30 AUD a roll, less than half the price of Kodak Gold. Sometimes what seems too good to be true, is indeed too good to be true – but sometimes it’s just an altruistic eBay seller cleaning out their freezer.

This stuff has aged like a single use plastic bag – it’s perfectly withstood the test of time with no noticeable degradation. The roll I shot performs exactly as expected, like any in-date film (at least to my eyes). There was no underexposure, haze, colour shifts, casts or other manifestations of film expiration that you may expect. Fancy that – an honest ebay seller.

This film was pretty forgiving, especially for a slide film. I managed to get usable images even where the lighting was unfavourable or I was half a stop off an ideal exposure.

Where this film shines for me is its lovely colour rendering and smooth tones. Even in overcast conditions or direct sunlight, colours were pleasing with a nice pastel quality.

So with one roll done, I’m pleased to say that Fujichrome Sensia 100 – the discontinued and largely forgotten consumer grade slide film from Fuji – is a film worth trying, if you can get some at a decent price.

I’m looking forward to shooting some more of this stuff - hopefully the other 9 rolls held up just as well after all these years.