Produced in Romania, the only colour film negative made in this country, today discontinued (the film, not the country). For the regular amateur photographer in Romania, this film was the most available colour negative one would’ve had access to, between 1980 and 1990. Other than that, one had access to ORWO (both bw and colour, produced in the GDR), Soviet-made colour negative in various emulsions, some Hungarian-made film, and that was basically it.
However, some well-connected photographers had their own unofficial channels to get some Western-made bw and colour films. To be fair, until mid-80s, one could buy these films in any specific shop. Later on, until 1989, film became scarce and less and less available. Anyways, the Azopan film was discontinued in the late 90’s or so, in both bw and colour emulsions.
I am not going to go again through the history of the factory, of the film, etc. You can read about it here, in a couple of articles: AZOPAN PS21 and AZOPAN PS-24.
This film now is sought by Romanian amateur photographers, and prices are up to (almost) premium, unexpectedly so. I don’t get it: at its best, this film was not exactly Kodak, so why the high prices? What with film doubling prices these days, looks like everything is lomography this and lomography that, I guess. Btw, did I mentioned lomography? 🙂 🙂 🙂
There was another iteration of this film, a different design, produced earlier, at some point during the mid-80s. The canister is easy to recognize: metallic built, light trap perpendicular on the cartridge (not angled), grey painted, with red painted labels (later models were stickers), extremely sturdy.
The photographs lower on this page were taken with Kiev 4AM camera, the film was a ACN 100 expired in the late 80s. Still all right, but there is a slight colour shifting and loss of sharpness in some of the photos.
In the Romania of those days almost nobody used color negative. Neither Azo or ORWO. The reason was simple: It was difficult to get prints. There were no labs, except in Bucharest. For home you needed color paper, that was unavaible.
The amateur back then used slides for color photography. It could be developed at home in the bathroom/kitchen and the quality of the ORWO slides was good. Developing kits existed from ORWO or Finomvegyszer Budapest. At least until the 80s, after that it became somewhat difficult to get the films.