How long can a 35mm film be used/stored before it starts to lose its quality after expiry?

Question

I'm somewhat of a beginner I would say in 35mm film photography. The last time I shot was back in the early 2000s with a Ricoh AF-7 that my dad gifted me. After the camera had some issues and couldn't be fixed, I had never used a film camera until now. I've always loved film photography and the process itself of developing your own images. Recently I decided to get a Minolta SLR camera and some films for really cheap prices and get some shots.

I purchased three packs of film rolls.

1. Fujicolor 200 pack of 4 rolls with Expiry date 02/2007 (I was told by the seller that this was refrigerated)
2. Fuji XTRA 400 pack of 4 with Expiry date 09/2018 (unknown storage condition)
3. Kodak Ultramax 400 pack of 3 rolls with Expiry date 02/2017 (unknown storage condition)

The Fujicolor 200 was mainly purchased with the intention of trial. Also, I'll be developing it myself so don't want to do it on a good roll for the first few tries.

Will the images from the Fujicolor 200 be terrible due to its age? I'm assuming that the Fuji 400 is only a couple of months old so I might get lucky for a few months if I keep it in the freezer. As for the Kodak again its almost 2 years so I'm skeptical if that will be having grainy images, too.

Answer 1

One of the users on Photo.net is a chemical engineer who worked at Kodak for ~30 years. He posted the following information in a thread over there about Life expectancy for refrigerated film:

In all cases where we are using film past its expiration date, the only safe approach is to try a roll OF EACH PRODUCT and evaluate it before shooting the rest of that product. The stability of film products is different for different products.

Having said that, here are some general guidelines. The expiration date for many products is about 2 years after manufacture. Refrigeration will preserve the the chemical properties of film for 2 to 4 times longer than at room temperature. If you bought fresh film and refrigerated it, the chemical properties should last 4 to 8 years instead of 2.

Freezing will preserve the chemical properties for something like 8 to 16 times longer than at room temperature. Frozen film can be expected to maintain chemical properties for 16 to 32 years.

Unless you have access to a salt mine, background radiation cannot be stopped by any process that any of us can afford. Background radiation causes fog and grain increases in the shadow areas. All films are sensitive to background radiation ROUGHLY in proportion to film speed. That is, an 800 speed film would be roughly 32 times as sensitive as a 25 speed film. This is very rough since the current Kodak 800 speed film is about 1/4 as sensitive as the generation from 8 years ago. All these discussions of keeping film in a refrigerator or freezer should only apply to low speed films (200 or slower). With high speed films, the background radiation will degrade the film regardless of the storage temperature.

FWIW, I've shot K-64 that had been in my freezer for 20 years with good results. I don't shoot 800 speed film that has only 6 months until expiration.

In fact there is a ton of information about this on Photo.net if you search around.

There are also some questions here that could be useful:

• Does film (get a chance to) degrade before sale?
• How do I prepare frozen/refrigerated film for use?

Kodak and Fujifilm are still making high-quality, fresh, reliable, gorgeous colour film. Take a look at (for example) Freestyle Photographic Supplies to see other current manufacturers. I would encourage any budding film user to buy fresh film - you don't need to worry about storage conditions, and you are supporting continued film manufacture.

Answer 2

I had a roll of Fuji 200-24 35mm film that I shot back in 1988 and developed it in 2022 and all the pictures, came out verryyyy clear. I’m quite surprised and extremely happy they all came out . So the film went from Scotland while in the Navy, to my parents refrigerator, to my apartments refrigerator, to my house’s refrigerator and then out of it for 1 year and than developed on Dec 2021.

Answer 3

Which brand still produces new films?

Although the market is considerably smaller than it used to be, there is still decent number of companies producing fresh film. Note that most of the production has been scaled down.

From the top of my head:

Traditional films

• Kodak
• Fujifilm (pulling back)
• Ilford
• Kentmere
• ADOX
• Foma
• Rollei
• CineStill (rebranded Kodak motion picture films, with removed remjet)
• Lomography (rebranded Kodak stock, new emulsions produced by Kodak)
• Film Washi

Instant films

• Polaroid Originals
• ONE INSTANT (est. summer 2019) EDIT: not fresh film but reused expired chemistry
• Fujifilm (Instax)