That's because he appears to be very knowledgeable about Adox's products and way back in 2012 he was testing this film:
And BTW the questions were answered by
Mirko:
Just because something is "technically" better doesn't make it better for every purpose. Frankly older films had more life and better tonality. You can see it. Look at Tri-X for example. It kept getting "improved" to the point where it doesn't look anywhere near the same as it used to. Some people think that is a good thing, but in today's world I'd argue it isn't really.
Seems to me by limiting silver and also thinning the emulsion films have become rather generic and digital looking. I wish someone would rewind the clock and make a film that was more malleable, like old films used to be. If I want grainless I can just use a digital camera, which at this point has eclipsed film for "grainless" purposes.
I am sympathetic to the desire for items from the past. However, very careful analysis doesn't support that modern materials can't yield the same tonality as older materials.
There is a difference in resulting grain structure. This is a combination of printer optical properties, film developer, density level, and the grain structure created in film manufacturing.
The use of less silver is a desired result of using the silver more efficiently. Adding silver only to have it ending up in the fixer doesn't accomplish much.
Technically better means the measurable characteristic are measured and the results are repeatable. Some unmeasurable characteristics may change but objective and even subjective evaluation doesn't support the argument. For the final evaluation of new film performance we depended on side-by-side evaluation in the hands of highly skilled practicing photographers doing many kinds of work in a wide variety of locations throughout the World.
In most cases the number of possible film products is limited. Having tens of different b&w 400 speed films might be desirable but not practical. In the case of T-Max we thought the differences were sufficient to justify a film in addition to Tri-X. We also demonstrated that a specific T-MAX 100 was justified because of the grain advantage. We had multiple variations of each and chose the ones that were preferred by customers. The same is true of Portra Films as described in "Making KODAK Film". We tried variations in saturation, spectral sensitivity, contrast, inter-image, MTF, grain, curve shape etc. Originally we had Natural Color and Vivid Color choices. With scanning on one survived.