Miss-marked film or lucky?

[mlynch]

I recently shot a roll of Portra 400NC, or at least I thought it was until I

looked at negs that came back. Border reads 160NC. The roll of film came from

a 5-roll sleeve of 400NC. Now I'm reasonably observant of the film cartridge

because I do a lot of shooting with my old cameras where I have to set the

film speed manually on both camera and flash. All the negatives look fine when

scanned with my Nikon Coolscan V.

 

Did I get lucky or was the film miss-marked somehow?

[josphy]

Assuming you were using a fairly modern camera, film is DX coded, so the camera reads the film speed and sets accordingly, so unless you manually changed the film speed, the camera was metering properly for the film speed and hence your negatives looking ok.

[mlynch]

Joseph:

 

Thanks for your reply, but as I indicated in my post I was not using a "modern" camera. Actually a Canon AV-1 with a 299 flash. Both require an ISO setting, which were set at 400.

[josphy]

Ah okay, well I wasn't sure if you were just saying that to illustrate that you tend to be observant of the film or if you were actually using one of your older cameras at this particular time. In that case, hard to say. If it was 160NC, then you were underexposing it by a little over a stop, which is within the range where you could get useable negatives.