Portra BW vs. T400CN

[the_macman]

A question below made me ask another one: What's the difference between

Portra 400BW and T400CN ? I use Portra from time to time, never tried

T400CN.

 

Kodak Professional website seems to have been made by some idiots

thinking they were doing Kodak consumer one so as usual, it is packed with

colorful bull shit and pointless adjectives which gave me no useful information

(besides the .pdf). It says though the T400CN has a great latitude (25-1600).

How's Portra on that?

[bernhard]

Portra B&W has an orange mask that is exactly the same as the other Porta films, so it is easy (easier) to get neutral prints when a lab has setup a channel for Porta films. TCN has a slightly different mask and is slightly less expensive.

 

This only matters with optical labs as digital ones (should) desaturate anyway. The cheapest KODAK C-41 B&W way to go is B&W 400+ (= amateur TCN) *IF* you print on a digital machine.

[eric rose]

I print T400CN on normal B&W paper all the time with no problems. Even lends itself to split printing.

[scott_eaton]

T400CN has an orange mask that is between Portra B/W and XP2. I've printed a lot of it with conventional optical enlargers along with conventional machine printers, and T400CN is certainly much friendier with color film channels than XP2. It's a 30-40 CC offset vs a 70-90 like XP2 to get it to match a typical C-41 orange mask.

 

Portra B/W however mimmicks the dense orange mask of the Portra C-41 films, and is much easier for conventional labs to get it to work on color film channels than T400CN. While I can work with T400CN on variable contrast B/W papers, I'd much rather use XP2. Printing T400CN with a B/W enlarger is like printing XP2 with a dense olive mask stuck in the filter drawer. Why you'd want to do this I have no idea other than you like the flatter T400CN.

[greg_tomas]

Portra and TC400N are essentially the same film...other than film base colour. Portra is the "professional" film and therefore costs more. Both films exibit the finest grain if overexposed by 1 stop.

[adrian_tuazon]

I did notice that Portra B&W film prints more neutral on colour paper compared to T400CN or XP2 (when you have them proofed off Fuji Frontier). But this does depend on your pro lab.