Famous APUGer indeed! That would be Les McLean and Michael A. Smith.
Notorious maybe...no that would be Robert Kennedy (at least in Photo.net circles)
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Acros is meant to be enlarged, it yields a mediocre contact print. Enlarged, it provides a print with excellent scale. Strong blacks, brilliant whites and grainless grays. This is something I've never been able to achieve with tmax100 or delta 100. to provide adequate shadow detail, it should be exposed at EI 50, at most, making it slower than tmax. It has excellent reciprocity characteristics; I've shot 4 minute exposures with no correction. Try XTOL 1:1. I've also gotten good results with rollo pyro, yielding absolutely grainless 13x19 inch prints from a 5x7 neg.
And David, it also helps not to boil it, in the Jobo, before developing. (see dgh's other post).
There is an interesting phenomena going on here, in terms of apparent sharpness. For all the good things I've said about Acros, I'm using more and more Tri-x 320 film. For contacts certainly, and my usual 2x enlargements, Tri-x seems seems to yield a "sharper" print, even though much more detail is visible in the Acros neg when viewed with a 5x loupe.
Is this "apparent sharpness" effect accutance or local contrast? I don't know, but I think it explains why a AZO contact print from a Bergger BPF neg developed in ABC Pyro would look so much sharper than the same print made with a tgrain film and developed in a standard developer (hc110, d76 or xtol). has a lot to do with the way our brain percieves sharpness in a photographic print.
Seems that your choice of materials should be dictated by the size of the final print (meaning you might conclude that you should use a grainy film if you intend to do only a 3x enlargement, because a less grainy, better resolving, film might produce an inferior looking print at that magnification, even on the same paper).
So, David, besides the Acros I made you buy, you should pick up some Tri-x 320 or HP5 to print with, as well.
Tom
