Agfa Copex Rapid advice please

[cptrios]

Alright, I'm still messing around here. I went back and tried Caffenol CLCN again, this time with 1 inversion every minute (but forgetting to reduce dev time). It did seem to tone down the edge effect. Not totally though, which is heavily bothersome to me. I'll take another crack at it at some point!

Full frame of a scan with my 'new' A7rII:

100% crop from that single-frame scan (this is with a Micro-Nikkor 55/2.8 AF) at...I dunno, 5400dpi:

And then with the PK-whatever extension tube, resulting in something like 8000dpi, oversharpened to accentuate the brick patterns, railings, etc:

Not unreasonable to think that more detail could be squeezed out of that with a bit higher magnification.

 

[fs999]

Nice result !

 

[cptrios]

Ok, just because I know you all are soooooo interested...I picked up a super cheap M42 macro bellows and whacked my old Macro-Takumar (a perfectly serviceable macro lens but not great for film scanning) onto it. I suppose the resulting magnification is something like 2.8:1?

The full frame of this would end up being around 30000x20000, and totally impractical. Also, as you can see, not worth it. 2:1 (or the above 1.4:1 with a higher-res sensor) is probably the point of heavily diminishing returns for this film/dev combo. It does resolve that railing on the roof better than the A7r2 itself, though, but only because of moiré. I don't think it's unreasonable to call this a 36-megapixel film, which if you think about it is pretty impressive.

 

[loccdor]

It is indeed interesting. If Caffenol can resolve that kind of detail with it, other developers should be able to do even more.

 

[cptrios]

Ugh 35mm is showing as discontinued at B&H and currently unavailable at Freestyle. Hopefully it’s not actually gone, because that would pretty much do it for high-res films. I know there’s HR-50, but I didn’t have very good results with it, even in HR-Dev.

 

[Henning Serger]

It does resolve that railing on the roof better than the A7r2 itself, though, but only because of moiré. I don't think it's unreasonable to call this a 36-megapixel film, which if you think about it is pretty impressive.

It is much much more than a 36 MP film.
I have used Copex Rapid a lot, and also tested it in my resolution film test compared to almost all other films on the market.
In that test I got the following result for the system resolution (lens+film) with my standard test lens Zeiss 2/50 ZF, and a test object contrast of two stops (1:4):
165-180 lp/mm.

Under exactly the same test conditions with the same lens I got with the 45 MP Nikon D850:
95-100 lp/mm.

A huge difference in favour of Copex Rapid.
But to see that difference you have to avoid camera scanning (it simply cannot resolve the detail completely). You have to use optical enlargement methods. Easiest way to see it is a microscope, or in projection (the film can be reversal processed, or you project the negative).

Best regards,
Henning

 

[Henning Serger]

Ugh 35mm is showing as discontinued at B&H and currently unavailable at Freestyle. Hopefully it’s not actually gone, because that would pretty much do it for high-res films.

The film was discontinued years ago.
But there is still some stock available as rebranded SPUR DSX.

Best regards,
Henning

 

[cptrios]

It is much much more than a 36 MP film.
I have used Copex Rapid a lot, and also tested it in my resolution film test compared to almost all other films on the market.
In that test I got the following result for the system resolution (lens+film) with my standard test lens Zeiss 2/50 ZF, and a test object contrast of two stops (1:4):
165-180 lp/mm.

Under exactly the same test conditions with the same lens I got with the 45 MP Nikon D850:
95-100 lp/mm.

A huge difference in favour of Copex Rapid.
But to see that difference you have to avoid camera scanning (it simply cannot resolve the detail completely). You have to use optical enlargement methods. Easiest way to see it is a microscope, or in projection (the film can be reversal processed, or you project the negative).

Best regards,
Henning

Thanks for that reply Henning! Your tests have always been super useful and much appreciated. I've been having some fun with magnification in the last few days, playing around with a lens test roll that I did a while back (and posted in this thread a page or two ago). I'm not using the appropriate developers for detail (really, just HC-110 and caffenol) so I'm sure it's not fair, but Copex has kind of blown TMX out of the water in practical use.

(edit: I originally posted some more magnification shots but I want to redo them)

Out of curiosity, have you ever done any tests with Kodak Imagelink HQ? I just picked up two bulk rolls of it but I don't have a nonperf-friendly camera to test it out with yet.

 

[Henning Serger]

Thanks for that reply Henning! Your tests have always been super useful and much appreciated.

Thank you, my pleasure.

Out of curiosity, have you ever done any tests with Kodak Imagelink HQ?

No, sorry, I haven't. From Kodak's ultra-high resolution films I have used Technical Pan.

Best regards,
Henning

 

[cptrios]

Ooook, here's a bit of "cptrios has a new macro bellows and too much time on his hands...but he doesn't actually have that much time on his hands, so he should probably be spending it on something else" action!

Earlier this year I used Copex Rapid to test out a couple of lenses on a local hill. I included some scans from one frame a few pages back, I think. Now that I have more scanning options at my fingertips, I figured it might be interesting to see just how much could be squeezed out of it.

This was originally shot with a Rikenon P 50mm f/1.4 (definitely the best manual focus 50/1.4 I've ever used, though I've never had a Zeiss C/Y) on a Pentax ME Super, and I thiiink this frame was at f/4. Though it could have been f/2.8.

First, the full shot:

And a crop from the 1x scan, using a Micro-Nikkor AF 55/2.8 (originally 42mp, 7952x5304). Pretty impressive detail already, I think; if you apply a smidge of USM to it, it doesn't look all that different from a digital shot from the same camera.

Same setup but with the M2 extension ring. I'm not exactly sure what the magnification is, but 4 stitched shots result in a 12739x8539 file, so let's call it 1.6x. Definitely getting a bit more detail in the white flag on the side of the truck, as well as the text. Not a huge jump, but not nothing either.

Now, with the new addition to the setup: a reversed Rodagon 50/2.8 on a Pentax m42 auto-bellows. Things are getting dicey here with plane alignment, etc, and this is pretty heavily stretching the bounds of practicality. It requires 9 stitched shots to cover the whole frame, and all of the variables in the platform-light-panel-film-holder-copy-stand-bellows-camera chain need to be perfect to make it work. Final file size was almost exactly 20,000x13,400px, so 2.5xish. 268mp! Again, not an overwhelming amount of new detail on the truck, but certainly more than on the previous magnification:

However, things get more interesting with the fence a bit to the right:

Finally, from the "ridiculous" category, I decided to have a bit of fun and use a 4x microscope optic. This is completely impractical, and it was a royal pain to even get the thing in focus with its insanely thin DoF. I'll put the previous crop and the new one side by side here so you can flip back and forth:

Did we get anything more out of it? Maybe? A tiny bit? Let's look at the fence:

A bit more! Also worth noting that even that 4x shot, if the microscope lens had better "sharpness coverage," would be a totally passable 8x12 print despite being a 15% crop of the original frame. Cool!