Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/02/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Douglas Cooper wrote: > Interesting. I've always been told to avoid ASA 200 commercial film, as all > the research is poured into 100 and 400. Is the 200 really that popular? I think that there may be only one amateur film. If you expose it at 100, it is harsh and contrasty. At 400 it starts to get grainy. At 800 it is very grainy and has razor-thin shadows. Kodak just puts it in different boxes and charges different prices to maximize their profit. A friend of mine came to a similar conclusion fifteen years ago when testing the (then new) T-Max films in HC-110. He spent the better part of a week making test prints, trying different processing times, dilutions, agitation and temperatures, and hogging the densitometer (this was a university darkroom). After he was done, he told me in frustration that they were in fact the very same film. If a batch came out slightly faster, they would label it 400, otherwise it would go out as 100. As it turns out, perhaps HC-110 was the wrong developer to use for this test... When I repeated the same tests later using T-Max developer, I found almost a full stop of real speed difference :). NO CONSPIRACY? Bernard