bernhard

I wanted to restrain myself, but after reading so many comments that you can't get decent neutral prints from XP2 from minilabs using color paper I can't help myself.

 

This is not true, this BS.

 

Agreed, an optical lab will give you inconsistent, bad looking tinted prints and you should not have XP2 printed in such a lab, BUT any digital lab should deliver perfectly neutral prints. Everytime. Or they are so stupid, that they deserve being put out of business.

 

If you haven't tried it, get a roll of XP2 and drop it of at any Fuji Frontier shop and see for yourself.

XP2 has no orange mask, while every other C41 B&W film has. This means XP2 is the best of that bunch to print in a conventional darkroom. Orange mask c41 B&W films can be printed in a conventional B&W darkroom as well but are not optimal.

 

All of these films can be printed on color paper as well with excellent results. But good neutral prints from XP2 in an optical lab are very hard to do, because the lack of the orange mask necessitates pretty brutal filtering and most labs have not enough experience with this. TCN and Porta B&W are much easier to handle.

 

From a digital printer (Fuji Frontier, Noritsu, Agfa D-lab, ...) they all should come out perfecly neutral, if not, the lab is just too plain stupid to tell the printing machine to print B&W and you should switch labs.

 

Essentially, get a roll of any of these films print it on a Fuji Frontier and you'll be happy. If you intend to print the negs in a conventional darkroom get XP2. You can also use any C41 color film and just tell the digital lab to print B&W, this has the advantage that you can print in color too if you should like to later on, and you can use films with higher contrast (e.g. superia 400 X-tra) if you want, as the the C41 B&W film are rather low contrast (especially if you shoot them @ ISO 100), which fine for some stuff, but not for everything.

 

Hope this answers your question :o)

Zone Alarm works fine on my computers, it just informs you about every packet that is blocked for whatever reason. Turn off alarms and your fine.

I recently read the 'biography' of the Magnum photo agency (Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History: The Story of the Legendary Photo Agency, Russell Miller) and it is mentioned that he used HP5. I guess he used both.

HCB HP5

I used to live in San diego and I used Photofactory. They deliver very good results, but for less money I can develop myself with more control. I would hand them any B&W film any time and upon request they also use other developers. But unfortunatley not everyone has such a great lab nearby.

 

So I wholeheartedly agree with you.

 

Say hello to San Diego and the beaches for me, at times like these when we emerge from German winter (grey skies, sleet, rain, little snow but still cold) I really miss San Diego.

You can get 1600 from Fuji Superia/Press 1600 dev'd/Printed in a consumer minilab, but for anything above that you need a pro lab. I would probably use NPZ pushed 2 stops or Superia/Press 1600 pushed 1 stop. Shooting a B&W 3200 ISO film (TMZ or Delta 3200) and sending it to some place for developing and printing is a sure recipe for disaster. If you don't develop yourself or know a real good dedicated B&W lab, stick to the films above and hand them to a pro lab.

 

Pushing TCN 3 stops to 3200 will yield pretty poor negs with increased grain and poor shadow detail. Not pretty.

I had the same experience with TMX sent to Kodak (my first a last roll I didn't process myself). It's probably a combo of suboptimal (learned that euphemispeak in the US) development with careless machine printing.

 

Developing your own film is cheap and easy and you give a up every single advantage these material have by not doing it yourself. Or locate a REALLY good dedicated custom B&W lab, then the quality should be fine, but the prices will drive you back to your own reels.

 

So do yourself a favour, do it yourself. Or keep on using C-41 B&W.

I always have my eyes closed when loading film on reels and never had a problem. So I'll keep doing what works.

"If it were a digital printer like a Frontier it really wouldn't matter what film you use."

 

I agree, I shouldn't. But it does a little bit.

 

Although XP2 and TCN came back perfectly neutral several times from a Frontier lab, the XP2 had significant more grain in the shadows. I suspect that the orange mask of TCN works better with the lab's standard black- and white point settings.

 

So I'd use XP2 if you print yourself in a wet lab, to print on any kind of commercial lab on color paper I'd use a film with orange mask.

Scot E. said:"The B/W chromogenics can't touch Portra UC 400 in terms of grain/speed ratio either."

 

Portra 400 B&W has a PGI of 40 @ 8.8x whereas Portra 400UC has a PGI of 60 @ 8.8x magnification (Kodak Teck Pubs E190 and F4012). If you believe this numbers, then Porta B&W should have a better grain/speed ratio. Has anyone compared the stuff side by side on a Frontier?

"The stuff that was not pushed and processed normally by Peak Imaging (12 pounds a go for 36 at 7.5" x 5") looked like Claude Monet had added the colour personally."

 

What does this mean? Incorrect colors ? I'm really intersted to get a good idea how your results turned out, as I was one who pushed for pushing in the original discussion.

Hi Nick, good to hear your pics turned out fine. You said there was roll of Reala developed normally. How did it compare to the pushed ones?

Bernhard Mayr: "My recipe is simple: I process everything at room temperature"

 

Scott Eaton:"Which wastes tremendous amounts of energy and time."

 

Scott, what post are you referring to? I was talking about processing B&W at the temperature the (unheated) water comes out of the faucet.

My recipe is simple: I process everything at room temperature, which is usually between 21 and 23°C and adjust developing time. So everything (developer, fixer, rinsing water) has the same temp. End of story.

Occasionally I tried mixing Xtol and Rodinal myself and although I haven't run side by side comparisons I will use this combo again.

 

One thing that might be helpful would be to figure out dilutions for Rodinal and HC110 that need exactly the same developing time with HP5. Then you could very easily take 3 pictures of the same thing and develop in Rodinal, HC110 and a 50% each mixture and compare. If you see any benefit from the mixture and want to go on using it, you could then fine tune it by trying 25%/75%, 75%/25% mixtures and so on and keep one variable (your processing time) constant.

 

By the way I don't think HP5 is the best film for this, because Rodinal umixed gives big but mushy grain and that is not why I (you) want to use Rodinal, I want to use it to get well defined grain.

 

I used DD-X/Rodinal twice to push 400TX 120 to 1600-3200: I souped 1 roll 400TX 120 in 35ml DDX + 5ml Rodinal + 460ml water, 30min@23°C (=40min @ 20°), agitation 5s vigorous every 3 minutes and got slight base fog and very usable negs (http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=1567156).

 

A second roll was souped in 20ml DDX, 2,5ml Rodinal, 475ml water, 3h@23°C, agitation 5s vigorous every 30 minutes (modified stand development), gave significantly higher base fog and brown sooty deposit on neg that could be washed off. No significant difference in contrast or shadow detail between the two methods. On close examination with a loupe I could not find ANY adjacency effect and the negs didn't look like high acutance to me either.

 

I other words, if you are doing this (adding Rodinal to HC110) to coax high accutance out of HP5, I think you will be diappointed. You might as well use a tried combo like 320TXP and Rodinal.

XP2@100 will make dense negs, but even more important, contrast will be even lower. You might want to use this only in REALLY high contrast. If you want a 100 speed C41 film, use any 100 ISO color film and print B&W on Frontier or scan yourself. For higher contrast use slide film and print B&W on a Frontier, although for slides this may take a prolab to get good results.

Shoot B&W and develop yourself. Or go digital.

Just a follow up: According to Kodak Tech Pubs Portra B&W (C41) has a lower Print Grain Index than Portra 400UC (Kodaks best 400 speed color print film), so by using Portra B&W you should get finer grain. But I haven't run a comparison myself, so I don't know whther the difference @11x14 would be significant or not.

if Scott doesn't read your post: I recall from some of his postings that he hates to correct daylight balanced film shot under tungsten without filtration or exposure adjustment, because one of the layers (I think the blue sensitive) is so underexposed/thin that you have no density/information in this channel to work with and end up with weird color cross over. So the least would be to give more exposure to gain some density in this layer to give the lab something to work with. His preferred way however is to 'slap on a filter' that gets the color balance closer (or all the way) where it should be.

 

Sorry for 'parrotting' Scott, just wanted to be helpful.

What Hans and Lex said, TCN or XP2 is a good ticket. But if your lab is a digital one (Fuji Frontier), they can print ANY color film as B&W and you might as well use a slower film like Fuji Reala for even less grain. In my experience TCN is cleaner (shadows) printed on the Frontier, I guess the default black and white point setting get better along with the orange mask of TCN.

Did you cjeckout this : http://www.photo.net/canon/ef50/

Not sharp at all, motion blur as said above. With proper techniques you should see an eye-popping difference to this.

I use Vuescan and scan slides in image mode, which means I bypass the adjustments Vuescan may make based on film type anyway and do the rest in photoshop.

If you happen to have an overcast day, Velvia (RVP 50) is gorgeous under these conditions. As I wouldn't want to boost colors under full sun I'd use Reala otherwise.