Britain's black-and-white giant is on a (colour) roll

For a company that didn't get round to releasing a colour film until more than 130 years into their career, Harman Technology seems to be making up for lost time.

On Thursday (5 March) the British film manufacturer announced Harman Switch Azure, an experimental colour film that renders the world in a strange range of hues from pink to turquoise.

It's the third colour film in little more than a year; following in the footsteps of the redscale Harman Red film and the second iteration of the Phoenix colour negative film.

All of this coming a little more than two years after it brought its first colour negative film, Phoenix 200.

Harman's dipping of its toes into the multi-hued pool of colour film has been, in my opinion, a masterclass of how to bring new analogue products out in the 21st Century.

Its films have been released with a long lead time for press and dealers, and some excellent pointers on how the film should be shot, processed and scanned.

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With every release, it has doubled down on a consistent message: the home of Ilford and Kentmere black-and-white films is having to unlearn a lot of its heritage and get to grips with a completely different way of making films.

And colour film recipes are dramatically more expensive, time-consuming and difficult to get right. You could easily spend a couple of million quid on the research and development and still not come anywhere close to a product you could then sell in the shops.

This release-tweak-improve approach is very different to how things were back in the past. Colour film-making companies like Eastman Kodak poured enormous resources into getting film exactly right before it left the lab. Emulsions were exhaustively tested and tweaked and improved behind closed doors. Films didn't make it to full-scale production until they were the best iteration they could be. Take a read of former Kodak chemist Robert Shanebrook's 'Making Kodak Film', which shows just what a monumental task making colour film can be.

That made sound sense backs in the 1980s and 90s when film was king and Eastman Kodak was slugging it out with Fujifilm and Agfa for a share of the colour film market.

Everyone who buys the film is, in essence, becoming part of an army of "beta testers" who test their emulsions in real-world conditions.

Switch Azure won't be for everyone; you could also argue that the niche is already well served by Lomography's Turquoise film, which has been around for several years. But with each colour film Harman put into production – even the ones with outlandish colour palettes like Red and Switch Azure – it gets more valuable experience making colour films. The learning curve suddenly seems a little less steep.

Other competitors are hot on their heels, too. China, now the world's biggest manufacturing base, has suddenly emerged as a potentially very big player in film development. China Lucky Film, once a seller of colour films in developing-world markets before the digital revolution, has come back into the picture. Its first film, Lucky Color 200, was teased, announced and then released at impressive pace; the first iteration seems closer to a Kodak-level colour film than the first generation of Harman Phoenix was.

And they're not the only Chinese company with colour film in their crosshairs. A Chinese company better known for lenses – Light Lens Lab – has announced an ambitious film project that will begin with black-and-white emulsions but has colour films on the roadmap too. And that's on top of other players like ORWO and Adox in Germany, also slowly piecing together the puzzle of colour film creation.

Who knows what else is taking shape in Harman’s Technology’s labs? Given the recent burst of activity, the safe bet is we won’t wait long to find out.