Hi!
I think this could be interesting to those limit-pushers among the B&W
crowd. As you may remember, I tried some time ago a ~3 iso emulsion
(document film - for lineart copying). Although I ran out of it quickly, I
then got about 30m of sound recording film a friend uses in his animation
movie company (yes, some people are still not doing digital animation :) .
I tried rating it at 6 iso, and developing it as Technical pan in XTOL
(which should, according to Kodak, give Techpan with 0.6 gamma=normal
contrast and speed of 4-12 iso, depending on XTOL dilution). While I got
somewhat higher contrast (~0.7?), the iso speed was about right, perhaps a
bit slower - 4.5 iso. It worked!
The merits of the film is that it's grainless. No grain. Period. I had to
use a microscope to see any grain at all - even my 15x loupe did not show
any grain!
Resolution is high too - resembling the Techpan (although propably not as
high as Techpan, the emulsion is not so thin). I tried it with a 1.4/50 -
my best lens (a 50 prime beats any other lens, period :). With this film, I
was able to get out detail that I couldn't see with normal ~100 B&W films.
There are two strange things about this film:
1) undeveloped film has strong pinkish colour, almost like Tmax films, and
it smells badly like them too
2) developed film is warm. Like warm B&W paper, I mean. Propably because
of the minuscule grain - I think that warmness/coldness of paper depends on
the size of grain lumps, no?
So, if you want to get the best out of your SMC lenses, grab that LX, lock
mirror up, get a rock solid tripod, put a _PRIME_ on it, set OTF metering
on 6 iso and fire off... You will get near the results that can be had from
medium format (but only near :) Never same :)
Hope you find it interesting & inspiring. I think such film could be had
quite cheaply from some film industry company, certainly cheaper than the
overpriced technical pan, which is too much expensive for just experiments
& amateur shots.
When I finally get to set up a scanner, I will post the results as well as
some extreme enlargements from the negative on my web site.
Frantisek
-
This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe,
go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to
visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
