Mitsubishi MX-III first roll review

Recently, the good folks at the FPP found a cache of 2006-expired Mitsubishi MX-III film. Peel the label off, and what do you have but some nice Kirkland Signature 200! Sadly, there’s no label to peel off, as with the ShurFine 200 I wrote about last week, but given the country of origin (and film canister) it appears to be a Konica (or Konica-Minolta) stock, possibly VX100. Just as soon as I finished the roll of ShurFine, I loaded a roll of the Mitsubishi into the Ricoh 500 ME, and wow! I like this stuff!

I shot the first part of the roll at 50, then dropped down to 25 for the rest. At EI 50, there’s a tiny bit of not-unpleasant grain, but it’s much cleaner than the ShurFine, and about as clean as, say, fresh Superia XTRA 400.

Sadly, I didn’t take note of when I switched from 50 to 25, but I know, but I’m sure it was after these two shots from the Bear Creek walking paths in Keller. (I grew up in Keller, and meant to go try and find some of the places where Granddad and I used to go feed the ducks, but I didn’t make it. Oh well. Another time, maybe.) I suspect these two (one near the beginning of the roll, one from the very end) were probably shot at 50 (left) and 25 (right), but I’m not entirely sure. I might’ve changed the meter setting back in Keller.

I finished off the roll at the Irving frisbee golf park, down by the creek, mostly, on an early morning. When I arrived, there was some fog down around the creek that borders the park (you can see some hint of it in the left side o the frame on the left, above), but by the time I ran down there, it had burned off. Oh well.

The color goes a little bit red (as you can see in the frame on the right, above) but it was fairly mostly easy to correct in Capture One Pro, though I didn’t quite get it right in all frames. I have a hard time remembering what the light and color looked like when I was shooting, and so my color correction is more to-taste than true to whatever the film would look like printed from a one hour lab or something, like it would’ve been back when it was fresh.

There were a couple of strange lines in a few frames at the end of the roll. I don’t know where these come from. They’re not consistent among frames, so it’s not a light leak, and I get them from different films and in different cameras, usually at the beginning or end of the roll. I suspect some manufacturing issue, but who knows. It’s only in this one frame below, so it wasn’t a big deal.

Unlike the ShurFine film, this roll of Mitsubishi MX-III dried more or less flat and has a light orange base, so it scanned easily and was mostly easy to process, once I got the hang of it. (In my current scanning scheme, color correction is more an art than a science. In 2019, I hope to update my method with the FilmLab app, but we’ll see. I like all the control I have over RAW frames from the D7000, but I’m dissatisfied with my current scanning procedure, so I need to do something, and scanning with an iPhone (and a clip-on macro lens) sounds intriguing.

Anyway.

I like this film. At more than 12 years out of date, it needs to be shot at a rather slow EI (50 or 25), but it has great color, smooth grain, and is really easy to work with.

Grain
Character
Handling
Processing

Overall, I give the Mitsubishi MX-III a very solid 4.5 stars, and I should really buy some more before it all disappears.

At time of writing, the FPP still had some rolls available, but they’re long gone now (as of December 2019). If I had some spare cash, I would’ve jumped on as many rolls as I could afford. Sadly, I was, and continue to be, a bit cash poor so it had to wait, and I waited so long that I forgot, and then they sold out… Shame. This is some nice film, if a bit slow, and I still have one roll of it in the fridge, I think…

Oh! Here’s my favorite shot from the roll.

I’m not sure why I like it so much, but I do. And dangit, I just noticed a hard water spot that I missed. Ugh. Good times. Oh well. I still like it.

If you’ve shot any Minolta MX-III, or have any thoughts on it, please let me know what you think!