Lensbusters.com

Not sure why I'm even looking, I've got plenty. Maybe so I can advise students at my school? In any case, I found myself looking to see what was the cheapest B&W 120 film I could find. In general, I think there's no such thing as a bad film.There are films that are easier to use and process, there are films with various traits that may not be suited for intended use. But I'm no longer interested in the sharpest finest grain films. I used to shoot Tech Pan and Agfapan 25 in the 1980's. Now I look at the prints and negs and, some are pretty nice. But on the whole they are too contrasty. I switched to ORWO NP20 (and later NP22 in the USA) and much prefer those negs. After ORWO stopped making consumer films, I moved on to Acros. Fuji Acros was a beautiful film, with wonderful tones as well as fine grain and minimal reciprocity failure issues. So today I'm going to do some searching and put the results up here. Please note, I'm in the US, so it's US suppl

While perusing an old photography magazine on Archive.org I found an early predecessor to the Sunny 16 rule we use today. The magazine was published in the Summer of 1937. We can learn a lot about photography from looking at this table. For one many of the shutter speeds will look somewhat different than we are used to. Modern shutters use fractions like this: 1/1000, 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2. If you picked up a camera of this era, for one, the shortest speed: 1/1000'th would have been a fancy camera. Many cameras of the era maxed out at 1/300, or 1/400. Most cameras also used a slightly different scale too: instead of the more modern 1/4 they veered to 1/5 and went up from there to 1/10, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100, 1/200, 1/400. Another thing to note (go to the original magazine article, link supplied) and you will see a wide variety of films. None of the films listed exist today. Most of the companies are now only footnotes in photographic history. And

When looking in to putting in a film order, I was really bummed out to find that my favorite film appears to be discontinued. Fuji Acros won over the crown as my favorite film after the demise of ORWO NP20 a couple of decades ago. Acros had a wonderful tonal scale, fine grain, and one other feature that there still is no competition for. It had almost no reciprocity failure. There was no recommended exposure adjustment until a full two minutes!!! Well, what is out there now? Here's a list of what appears to still be being made: Ilford : Pan F plus, FP4 plus, HP5 plus, SFX, XP2 plus, Delta 100, Delta 400, Delta 3200 Kodak : Tri-X, Tmax 100, Tmax 400, Bergger : Panchro 400 Foma (and Arista.edu): Fomapan 100, 200, 400 Ultrafine (Kentmere?): (E)Xtreme 100, 400 There are also a bunch of film stocks I believe are just repackaged: Rollei , Agfa , LOMO , Holga Black and white films I've used in my lifetime that are gone: Agfa : APX 25, 100, 400 Kodak : Plus X, Veri