As the poem says:For years there has been plenty of Pan X on Ebay for sale and not much interest in it. I noticed this last year it seems more people are now buying it. Some sales of bulk amounts of film selling 1 roll each have surfaced, asking for 20 or more dollars US per roll. Now all of a sudden it seems the well has dried up on stock. I wonder what fueled interest in this film in recent times? It was a film that never sold well when it was on the market. Now people seem to want it?
Probably someone on Youtube has used it?
It's been hyped - it's believed to be magical - mythically free of grain and capable of rendering detail down to the molecular level.
What it tells me is that their terms of reference are woefully limited. The 70s/80s FX I've encountered (none of it shot/ processed outwith its date stamps as far as I know) has about the same level of visual granularity as Delta 100 - but Delta 100 is a lot sharper & overall better able to usefully resolve details.
Indeed.I can't imagine starting any project with film that is no longer in production.
it would be kind of neat if Panatomic X were to come back,
At one time Pan-X was a somewhat unique film in that it had a long exposure scale more characteristic of faster films, but with the fine grain/sharpness of a slow film.
Once medium speed tabular grain films like TMX came along, Pan-X became obsolete. However (a) it is old, and (b) it has a cool name, hence the mystique.
I shot Panatomic-X in 35 and 120 exclusively throughout the 70s and into the 80s. Lachlan's assessment is accurate. It looked just like Plus-X but with finer grain. It took me a long time to accept its demise and get used to T grain films, but in today's world, Panatomic is obsolete. Tmax 100 is a superior product, if the user is careful with processing.I think that's the important point - in 135 (which is where 99% of the last generation FX-nostalgia is based on) the tone scales of the 135 versions of FX/ PX/ TX in D-76 or Microdol-X etc seem to have been close enough (to the end user 's perception) that they were essentially a continuum differentiated largely only by visible granularity and speed. Agfapan 25 and Agfpan 100 seem to have been intended to have similar relationships, and even Pan-F+ is pretty well behaved - if people pay attention to the shadow speed & keep a weather eye on their processing.
Delta 100 is great, but looks different than Panatomic-X. I can't complain about either film.Reading that Delta 100 might be considered a direct replacement almost made me blow my coffee out my nose. It’s a fine film, as is XP2, and CMS20II, but there is a lot more to what a film brings to the table than granularity and sharpness. Which everyone here usually knows.
CMS is essentially useless for normal photography without a special low contrast developer, and even when paired with a specialized developer, its exposure scale is not as long as that of a general purpose film (it doesn’t have a “normally” shaped characteristic curve either), and speed is low - somewhere around EI 12 at best from what I’ve seen in documentation.
I agree Lachlan - the nice thing about FX at the time was that from a sensitometry perspective it behaved like a faster film - long scale without any special concoctions or handling required.
I think this was fairly unique. Although I have no personal experience with films like Agfapan/APX 25, my understanding is those films had shorter scales more characteristic of fine grain films before the advent of tabular grains and newer dye sensitizations. Based on my limited experience with it, I would say even current Ilford Pan-F has this conventional fine grain/shorter scale characteristic to some degree.
To me, based on the curves I've seen for Pan-X (from Richard Henry's book and a few other sources) it was really the only "sub-100 speed" non-tabular emulsion to ever replicate the exposure scale/characteristic curve of faster films. Today I would call it obsolete in comparison to TMX.
Crawley's test for Amateur Photographer found it had slightly higher resolution.
It was from an era when the iodide content of films was lower and it responded much better to acutance developers.
More differences are mentioned in other posts above.
I have one roll left and a brick of Efke 25 to investigate one day.
Now, Plus -X, well....
Comments have left me wondering how many people actually have had extensive experience with Panatomic-X and also have had similar levels of experience with any of the substitutes mentioned. Reading that Delta 100 might be considered a direct replacement almost made me blow my coffee out my nose. It’s a fine film, as is XP2, and CMS20II, but there is a lot more to what a film brings to the table than granularity and sharpness. Which everyone here usually knows. There is nothing mentioned here, all of which I have used, which could be termed a direct, indistinguishable replacement for Panatomic-X, in my experience, outside of very cursory comparisons based on nothing more than grain visibility. The Who song, “Substitute” comes to mind.
It was my overall favorite black and white film, a personal preference based on use. I liked it, liked it better for my use than any of my current options, pretty much all of which I use as the occasion calls for. Pan-X is gone, (though I still have some left) I wish it weren’t; that doesn’t make me a fanboy. I just like it. And before anyone suggests, “but have you tried such and such, shot at such and such, developed in such and such?”, I probably have.
Has it been overhyped on the hipster corner of the internet? I don’t know, probably, isn’t everything? But that’s a separate subject.
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