Lensbusters.com

(13 September 2022 update, I think the title of this entry was misleading. The prints are from negatives developed with seasoned X-tol, the prints were developed with normal paper dev. If you read this previously, the title is updated to reflect that reality.)  Joke all you like. I'm a.... how does one politely put it.... frugal fellow. I've been looking into the least expensive means of developing film for a while. I'd been trying to use my thrifty skills on behalf of the school where I work (Mills College, which clearly didn't work out as we're working on shutting down.) For school I've had the lab setup to use HC-110 dilution E (1:47 from syrup, or 1:9 from stock.) HC-110 dilution E ended up being good solution for our school darkroom. Paterson tanks require 10oz per roll of 35mm, and 1:9 dilution makes math easy. And it costs about 25% of the developer we were using when I started. I like HC-110 ok. It works well for stand development. It's economical.

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