Helinophoto
Member
I have only worked a bit with Fomapan 100 and 400 (never the 200 speed film) and never liked the course grain. I have never had issues with the technical quality, the tonality is great, but I always had the impression that they have much coarser grain than other 100 and 400 films. As a side note, I usually do stand development in Rodinal and Foma films, both the 100 and 400, are two of the few films I have ever experienced bromide drag with, especially with the 135 films around the perforation holes. I would not risk that combination.
Mostly for my own purposes, to kind of confirm what I have always thought is right, I started a larger test to combine different films and developers a few months ago. I haven't got too far yet with my experiments, but to a certain degree confirmed the impressions I already had. Foma 100 is however one of the few films, where the choice of developer really matters. I know that faith can move rocks, but to be honest, most films only show very minor differences depending on which developer you bathe them in. That seem not to be the case for the Foma films. From my preliminary data, especially the Foma 100 film shows a very different behaviour in certain developers. In most developers, the Foma films are indeed coarser grained than the other films I have yet tested. After developing the Foma 100 in Spur Acurol N, I first thought that I had tested with the wrong film and repeated my test. It looks completely different, the grain is almost gone, sharpness and tonality still great. Acurol N was one of the developers I had never used before and only bought for this test and although it works with most films just as any other developer, I did not yet have any 'wow' experiences with that developer except for the combination with Foma 100. I have not yet tried it with Foma 400, but it is next on my list. I might do some more work with Foma and Acurol N, but the developer is so expensive that it chews away a large part of the Fomapan price advantage compared to e.g. Ilford in a regular priced developer.
That is very interesting.
What do you shoot Foma 100 at, when plan to develop it in Spur?