One can find old large format film on ebay for some pretty good prices (£4 -25 sheet 4x5). The question is, is it any good? I had accumulated some Plus-X (ASA 125, expired 1968) and some Tri-X (ASA 320 Expired 1985).
I compare the Plus-X to unexpired Fomapan 100 which is a very economical choice for B+W film. I find Fomapan to be a bit contrasty compared to Ilford Delta the only other large format film I have experience with. I ran this through my MPP MKIII large format. This is a camera I bid on but did not expect to win. I find it is rather intense and time consuming to use and as such is not good to use when you are out with others. Consequently it has seen limited use. The lens is a Fuji 210mm f5.6 which is a joy to use and reasonably priced.
I took identical photos with each film to compare. I rated the Plus-X at 2 stops slower to compensate for age. This gave me ASA 30 for the Plus-X. I stop it right down to f64 so exposures got out to 1 second on the Plus-X in daylight. However this is a tripod job no matter what. So in many ways old film works best in these beasts as you have to use a tripod anyway and slow film is less of a problem fror landscapes at least.
So what are the results? Below are two identical scenes shot on Plus-X and Fomapan 100. These are straight scans unmodified in any way. This means there is not much contrast as white and black levels have not been set. It does allow an objective comparison however.
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| Plus-X 125 shot at ASA 30 (expired 1968) |
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| Fomanpan 100 shot at 100 ASA (unexpired) |
The Plus-X is much lower contrast than the Fomapan. Inspection of the standard deviation in the histograms in Photoshop reveals the same conclusion. Of course one thing I have come to learn is that although one might (and I do) like higher contrast photos; it is not necessary or even desirable to start with a high contrast negative. Variable contrast (VC) paper allows substantial manipulation to increase contrast from a low contrast negative. On the other hand reducing the contrast from a high contrast negative is more difficult. This is due to the steepness of the transfer curve in the high contrast negative and the inherent sensitivity to small changes in exposure as illustrated below. The first transfer curve shows relatively low contrast where changes in brightness along the horizontal axis (x-axis) results in a given change in the vertical axis (y-axis). In this example a large change in brightness results in a smaller change in exposure on the print.
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| Low Contrast Curve |
In the second example a higher contrast (steeper) curve means that in order to affect the same result in exposure on the print (vertical or x-axis) one must make a much smaller change in brightness on the horizontal axis. Because the horizontal axis represents time of the exposure under the enlarger this becomes more difficult to control as one must move to increasingly smaller intervals of time.
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| High Contrast Curve |
A related example of this one see regularly when making test strips during split filter printing. When making the low contrast test strip with the #0 filter there is a smooth transition across each half stop interval. Below are test strips taken from the Plus-X negative on Kentmere VC Select RC paper.
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| Low Contrast Test Strip (8-64 seconds 1/2 stop intervals) #0 filter |
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| High Contrast Test Strip (8-64 seconds 1/2 stop intervals) #5 filter |
The high contrast example above builds very rapidly compared to the low contrast filter. This is even true on a low contrast negative as used here. It becomes very difficult to control the tone between these intervals and one would have to move to quarter stop or smaller intervals to get between these exposures. This illustrates the difficulty in working with high contrast negatives.
A couple of test prints were made using Kentmere RC VC Select paper. I don't have a 4x5 enlarger yet so I used my 6x6 cm enlarger to crop the same part of the image. The results are below. These are not final prints that have been properly fussed over being a first print based on test strip judgement. I have to conclude that my belief that lower contrast is a benefit when printing is born out here. That is not to say one could not get a good print from the Fomapan high contrast negative. My sense is it that it would be more work.
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| Fomapan 100 #5 22" #0 11" |
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| Plus-X #5 38" #0 22" |
Below is the datasheet for Plus-X film.
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