Another new color film is out. On the surface, anyway. Open the box and you find an emulsion that is already on the market. Once again, the small realities of indie color film are laid bare.

A new film from Optik Oldschool

Optik Oldschool is a small American film brand. It doesn't own a factory. It is closer to a company that takes film made elsewhere, adjusts it to its own taste and sells it in its own box. Its new release is OptiColour 200, an ISO 200, daylight, C-41, 36 EXP 35mm color negative film. The first shipments were 120 (medium format), starting in June 2025 at around €9.90, and the 35mm 36 exp box is rolling out in earnest in 2026.

A bridge seen past a car's side mirror. An OptiColour 200 sample with an overcast sky and striking cyan midtones.
An OptiColour 200 sample, shot while driving on an overcast day. You can see the tones lean slightly toward cyan. © Optik Oldschool.

Inside: ORWO Wolfen NC200

The box design is new, but the emulsion is already on the market. It is a color negative made by InovisCoat GmbH, which is to say ORWO Wolfen NC200.

First, the names need sorting out. ORWO is short for "ORiginal WOlfen," a brand that began at a factory in Bitterfeld-Wolfen in East Germany. The original ORWO company went bankrupt in 1994, and the brand and some of its assets passed through several hands before ending up at InovisCoat GmbH in Monheim am Rhein, Germany. InovisCoat is a small coating maker with know-how in color emulsion coating. In 2020, British businessman Jake Seal bought both InovisCoat and FilmoTec, a cine film company with East German roots, and got the current ORWO Wolfen line running in earnest.

In other words, the ORWO Wolfen color films on the market today are not direct descendants of the old East German ORWO factory. They are new coatings from InovisCoat. The same emulsion from the same coating line changes only its name depending on whose box it goes into.

One emulsion, four names

Right now the same InovisCoat NC200 emulsion is sold under at least four names.

Expose these four rolls under the same conditions, develop them in the same chemistry, and you get the same result. Only the box color and the price differ.

A frontal portrait of a woman in a hood on an overcast street. Her skin tones render softly against the cool gray of the background.
A portrait on an overcast day. The calm skin tones typical of the NC200 family. © Optik Oldschool.

The one thing Optik changed: the base color

So what did Optik change? It names one difference: the base color.

The original InovisCoat NC200 comes on a slightly greenish base. Users have long said that this green shows up as a color cast when scanning and makes more work in post. Optik had the film coated on the orange mask base used by ordinary color negative films instead. The result is a roll that fits better with the auto white balance and inversion profiles of a standard C-41 workflow.

Chemically it is the same emulsion. What changes is how much work scanning and editing take. Some people use the original NC200 precisely because they like the green base (they like the tones they get by working it themselves), and others find it a nuisance. Optik is aiming at the second group.

Mountains and river in the Columbia River Gorge. A light mist and clouds hang over it, and the midtones render calmly.
An OptiColour 200 landscape sample. The cyan of the sky and the middle gray of the river hold together in one tone. © Optik Oldschool.

Specs, price and release

The price is close to average for indie color negative. It lands at a moment when list prices for Kodak Gold 200 and Portra 400 have gone up and indie color looks attractive again on price.

How the ORWO Wolfen color line has evolved

While we are sorting out what OptiColour is, it helps to look at the current ORWO Wolfen color line too. The same InovisCoat coating line has been improving step by step.

Interestingly, the successor to NC400 is not a new ISO 400 but NC200, a stop slower. That seems to reflect how indie color film is mostly used: outdoors in daylight, for landscapes and portraits. It is also why OptiColour chose to start at 200.

A dark bar interior. A mounted deer head and signature advertising signs hang near the ceiling, and the whole frame renders warm under tungsten light.
OptiColour 200 under tungsten light. The warm cast shows the limits of a daylight-balanced film. © Optik Oldschool.

The OEM structure behind indie color film

Step back and the reality of color negative film comes into view again. The companies in the world that design and make new color film from scratch can be counted on one hand: Kodak, Fujifilm, ORWO Wolfen / InovisCoat, and a few small outfits that cut cine film down for still cameras. That's it.

Of these, InovisCoat is a small coating company that runs its own brand and OEM work at the same time. Brands like KONO!, Lomography and Optik have no coating lines of their own, so they end up queuing for the same InovisCoat line. There they adjust only the final touches, such as base color, box design and price, to suit themselves. That is how the same emulsion naturally ends up on the shelf under four names.

None of this is new. In the 1990s some Fuji films were sold under other companies' labels, and AGFA color went a similar way. The growing number of indie color films today does not really mean the market has grown. It means more labels are lining up at the same small coating line.

So before buying OptiColour 200, here is a question worth asking. It's NC200 either way, so which suits your workflow better, the green base or the orange one? Both are NC200, and that doesn't change. Whether the price gap between labels is worth the difference, you'll only know after shooting a roll of each.

A person reaching out beside a small campfire on a sandy beach. The warm tones of the embers balance the gray of the sand.
A campfire at dusk. NC200 tones in low, warm light. © Optik Oldschool.

Summary

Sources: PetaPixel, "Film Friday: Optik OptiColour Is a New Color Film That Goes By Many Names" (2026.06.05), Optik Oldschool official site, ORWO Wolfen / InovisCoat, KONO! / Lomography official lineups. All photos in this article are public materials from Optik Oldschool; please credit © Optik Oldschool. Import and distribution in Korea need separate confirmation.