After a failed attempt to
use old Russian 16mm film I decided to get new stock and after perusing ebay and reading up on B+W film the obvious choice was Kodak XX (Double X) 7222 16mm movie film. It is a proper negative film and has a fan base that admires its speed (200 in Tungsten and 250 in daylight) even tones and low grain. 100 ft (a lifetime supply for my purposes, About 1300 photos.) set me back £42. The
subclub has tons of resources for these small cameras. The loading for Minolta cartridges is covered
here.
I loaded about 8 inches into one of my film cartridges and took some quick test photos with my Minolta 16PS. I shot the photos at ASA 200. I developed the film according to Massive Dev chart in my normal film developer Ilford LC29. The timing for this development was for ASA 250. For properly metered shots the negatives came out well balanced.
Scanning 16mm is difficult as I don't have a proper holder and I could not locate the small glass plate I use for this. Both images look soft though scanned at 6400 dpi, the first is probably at the closeup limit of the camera but I suspect the negative was also not laying flat on the scanner.
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| Scanned negative inverted and level adjusted. |
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| Scanned negative inverted and level adjusted. |
I then set about making prints to better evaluate the focus and grain. I print these on half sheets of 8x10 paper (8x5) which gives a nice border.
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| Ilford MGIV Print f8 #5 32 sec #0 16 sec |
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| Ilford MGIV Print f8 #5 32 sec #0 22 sec |
These still look soft in terms of focus. The next set with the trellis are very sharp confirming my suspicions. The first is high contrast filter only which emphasizes the grain.
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| Ilford MGIV Print f8 #5 53 sec |
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| Ilford MGIV Print f8 #5 32 sec #0 16 sec |
The second version mixes some low contrast filtration for a smoother range of tones. These negatives are 10x14mm so very small hence the obvious grain. Below is a zoom on a portion of the first trellis photo with the high contrast filtration.
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| Zoom to show grain |
In conclusion I think the film works well. Enlarged to this size on 8x5" paper with a 6"x4" image makes for a really nice print.
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