New film?

Introduce a new film or re-introduce an old one?

FILM Ferrania is trying very hard to re-open an old factory and produce film. Their P30 film in an alpha testing right now.

I received some of the Ferrania P30. I'm just scanning some of the rolls I processed. The results are very nice. With HC110, good contrast, tonailty and grain. I hope to get more once they have further production up and running.

Another film I've been using is the JCH 400 in 35mm. They have just announced a 120 version as well. Between Ferrania, Berger, JCH, Adox, Film Washi, Fuji, Ilford and Kodak...and others....b&w is being well taken care of.

All the recent new Kodak films (Portra updates) were spinoffs from their motion picture R&D. Until recently motion picture film was about 80% of their business. That's the only business that could justify capital costs.

One other "elephant in the room" with regard to film production is MP print stock.

Even ~5 years ago, the market for that was huge. Every movie that was made, regardless of whether it started as a film or digital original, was spun off to a few thousand prints at a few thousand feet each for cinema release. Start adding that up with the number of movies made, and that amounts to a lot of film.

That market basically died overnight when the movie studios effectively forced the transition to digital projection.

A single movie might burn through a bunch of Vision3 or whatever stock they choose to use, and at least as I understand there's still a pretty strong market for that. I'd venture to guess that the loss of the print film market was a real blow, though.

Getting some nice results from P30 in HC110, Dil B

Plus-X they could certainly do a "special run" of, but they just can't sell enough to keep it in continuous availability.

I wonder how much Plus-X I'd have to buy to get some :) . I'm guessing we're talking master roll quantities, which I'm sure would be an easy 5 figures if not more and probably more than I'd shoot in the rest of my life.

Also, why stop there...I'd probably want a second roll on polyester to be cut into sheet film...