A couple of days ago, I read somewhere that the latest Classic Negative film simulation from Fuji is actually meant to replicate Superia, a popular film stock released in the late 90’s by Fuji.

Checking my old film photos I realized I have quite a lot taken with Superia. In fact, back in the days when I was living in Portugal I used to develop my negatives in a Fujifilm lab. As a business practice, photo labs used to bundle a couple of free film rolls as part of the service. Hence, I was often given Fujicolor Superia ISO 100, which was the most popular film stock back then.

A lot of these photos were actually taken in my hometown Macau when I was here on holidays. So then came the idea of making a comparison, to see the differences between Superia film negative and Classic Negative film simulation from my X-Pro3 — just for the fun of it.

Obviously, this is not meant to be scientific. For a like-for-like comparison, the photos would have to be taken at the same moment to ensure the same lighting conditions, and with the same camera-lens combination and exposure settings.

None of this was possible now, because the Superia photos you see below were shot more than 20 years ago… But the real fun for me was to go back to these places and try to replicate with my X-Pro3 the same framing and angle from the original photo.

This was what I enjoyed the most, and to see the differences in the surroundings, how things had changed — or not — over the years.

I’m deliberately not putting any caption below the photos because, I mean, it’s quite straightforward which ones are film and which ones are digital, right?

Due to the different lighting conditions though, this exercise is inconclusive to determine if Classic Negative does replicate Superia or not…

However, it does show what I already knew: that Classic Negative brings down dynamic range and pulls out higher contrast, resulting in a punchier image. And yes, it does look like film and it’s very pleasant to my eyes.