FP4 Plus changed?

In a recent thread titled "fp4+ in rodinal 1:25 - 6 or 9

minutes?" Alexey Tikhonov reported he was told that Ilford

has changed the gelatin hardening of the film, therefore

changing in processing time in recent production lots.

Presumably, Ilford did not change other aspects of the film

such as silver halide composition and structure, as implied

by continued use of the name, FP4 Plus.

 

One interesting thing to find in the spec sheet I just

downloaded is that the characteristic curve has a shoulder!

This might be of interest to those who loved old Plus-X.

 

(On my 1995 spec sheet Ilford mailed me years ago, the

shoulder isn't there. However, the new and old curves were

made with different developers and interpretation needs a

bit of caution -- i.e. test it in your processing.)

Hi Ryuji.<br>I think all that's happened is that Ilford has changed the developer used for their characteristic curve. The 'old' curve was for FP4plus in ID-11 stock strength, and the new one is for the same film in Ilfotec HC 1+31.<p>Unfortunately, Ilford still haven't seen fit to label the exposure axis of their new sensitometry curve in absolute lux-seconds, rather than the totally uninformative rel log exposure. Come on Ilford! Both Fuji and Kodak allow us to judge the true speed of their materials, by giving us graphs with a proper lux-second axis. What are you afraid of?

Pete, then do you think the fact Ilford changed developing time for pretty much all developers has nothing to do with the change in sensitometric data?

 

On the contrary, in HP5 Plus spec sheets (new and old), Ilford also changed the developer from ID-11 to Ilfotec-HC, but the plot hasn't changed much. They didn't seem to have changed HP5 Plus processing time.

 

Incidentally, AGFA also gives informative data on their spec sheets in a very concise way.

I haven't noticed any difference in FP4plus at all. Maybe I'm still using old stock, though.<br>There doesn't seem to be any official indication from Ilford that the film has changed at all; only the spec sheets have been updated. Perhaps David Carper could enlighten us?