For more than a century, Harman built its name on Ilford black-and-white film, and built it well. For 145 years, that was the company’s language: silver, grain, contrast, consistency, and a reputation that photographers trusted without question. That is exactly why its move into color feels so significant, just at the point when color film is back in fashion and is becoming harder to find.
This was not a brand casually branching out into a fashionable niche, but a company with deep roots in one discipline deciding to take on one of analog photography’s hardest technical challenges in full view of an increasingly passionate film-shooting community.
What makes the story even more remarkable is that Harman did not try to force color film through the same slow, traditional model that made its Ilford black-and-white stock famous. Instead, it built what can only be described as a "skunk works operation" inside the business: a small, agile, highly focused team given room to move quickly, experiment boldly, and rethink what was possible with the equipment, talent, and chemistry already on site.
By the sound of it, this was a hush-hush project at first, driven by R&D, fueled by belief, and carried forward by the kind of internal energy that only comes when people are told to do something they never thought they would see happen in their own careers.
That challenge was immense. black-and-white film is difficult enough to make well, but color is another world entirely, demanding more layers, more chemistry, more complexity, and far less room for error.
Harman’s team had to look at its factory, its processes, and its own collective expertise and ask a deceptively simple question: what can we take apart, rebuild, and reimagine to make this happen? That mindset led to Phoenix, the company’s first proof-of-concept color film, a product that was symbolic not just of a new stock hitting the market, but of a traditional manufacturer proving it could rise into a new era.
Above: watch the inspiring story behind the Harman color film project
Harman’s scientists, chemists, and lab techs at its Mobberley plant, just south of Manchester, UK, were effectively inventing from the ground up, building new emulsions, new layer packages, and new ways of coating and testing film in real time. Ideas were being formulated in the lab, rolled down on trolleys, coated on pilot machines in darkness, and then tested to see what worked and what failed.
That kind of hands-on, fast-moving development sounds thrilling enough on paper, but in practice, it is an extraordinary achievement. It is one thing to dream about making color film; it is another to hand brilliant people the freedom to break apart old assumptions and build a viable product for mass production on the fly.
What is especially exciting here is that Harman has not framed Phoenix as the finished product line. The company has been candid that Phoenix 1 was experimental, bold, contrast-heavy, and imperfect, and that Phoenix II improved on it while still leaving room to grow. That honesty matters. It shows this is not a nostalgia play dressed up as innovation, but a real research journey built on iteration, feedback, and reinvestment. Harman’s team is openly talking about improving sharpness, reducing halation, refining color reproduction, tightening granularity, and pushing speed, all while using each release as a stepping stone toward something bigger and more complete. The recently-released company video (above) shows the passion behind trying to make Harman as well known for color films as Ilford has become for its black-and-white formulations.
Just as impressive as the film itself is the infrastructure being built around it. Harman is not merely tinkering in a corner of the analog world; it is investing serious money in finishing lines, cassetting systems, robotics, and bespoke machinery designed for modern film manufacturing.
The company says it has built equipment that simply cannot be bought, only designed, manufactured, and assembled for its own needs. That matters because it turns a fascinating R&D story into something far more substantial: a long-term industrial commitment to film photography. In a market where analog shooters are always wondering who will still be making film in 10 or 20 years, that kind of investment feels huge.
For film photographers, that is the real story here. Harman’s color journey is not just impressive because it was technically difficult, or because a black-and-white specialist decided to take a swing at one of analog’s toughest problems. It is impressive because it offers something that film shooters crave almost as much as the images themselves: confidence in the future.
The idea that a historic manufacturer can create a fast-moving internal skunk works, develop color stock from scratch, scale toward global demand, and keep experimenting along the way is genuinely thrilling. For analog lovers, this is more than a product story. It is proof that film is still evolving, still worth investing in, and still capable of surprising us.
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