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New Arista Premium 100 and 400 films Made in USA

Paul Verizzo

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I shoulda clicked on a link!

Paul Verizzo said:
100 ISO now available in rolls, 400 also. No 100 in long rolls yet.

http://www.freestylephoto.biz/sc_newitems.php
Click to expand...

"out of stock" Available 8/15.

What a tease!

And look at those prices! $1.99 for 36 exposure of either speed. If the 100 is truly PX, then it's an even better deal. (PX costs more than TX, go figure.)

But no long roll ISO 100 posted yet. But if the price of the 100 is the same as the 400 - $30 - then buying 18 rolls for $36 already made up is a great bargain. I won't even bother with long rolls.
 

sun of sand

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I and almost asked whether Kodak would sell a prototype film that in the end just didn't meet their standards
Put Freestyle on it so it's not really associated with Kodak and still make some $.
But I doubt Kodak would make an entire run of a film -however many rolls that would be- and then not even put it out for market testing.
Seems way too wasteful/presumptuous for such a veteran


As for Freestyle I meant are they in any position to create spec a film and have it made by Kodak? I would not think so. That would make them a sort of Vivitar from the 70's and 80's.

Whatever
If plus-x and tri-x that sh*t is sweet. Not worth it to buy in bulk if that cheap, true.
I have a feeling it's T-max films, though.
 

patrickjames

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I am just speculating of course but it would make sense if they were the old T-Max films. Why is it 100 instead of Plus-X's 125? Kodak may have had a bunch left over that was uncut and they wouldn't be able to get rid of it any other way.

I am interested to know if anyone gets a definitive answer.
 

ssloansjca

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Has anybody tried printing or tried "doing that other thing you do with 35mm film" to make prints with it? I bought 200 ft and am wondering how it has come out. It will be awhile before I get images to paper.

Now, if only they come out with an ISO 32 speed B&W "made in USA" film I will be very excited...

Steve Sloan
 

2F/2F

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Well, the answer, besides being obvious from indirect information (U.S.A. manufacturer, and same times as Plus-X and Tri-X), should be easy to figure out with a simple controlled test. At around noontime, put yer camera on a tripod, place a grey card and a Macbeth Color Checker side by side and shoot with rolls of both Arista Premium 100 and Plus-X, and do the same with Arista Premium 400 and Tri-X. Rewind the film, but don't pull it all the way back into the cassette. Shoot the *same exact* sequence of shots in the exact same light film to film, changing *nothing* but the film. Snip the beginning off each roll. Develop the Premium 100 and the Plus-X together, and the Premium 400 and the Tri-X together. Take the snipped and developed film to a lab and have them read it on their densitometer. If they're different, then they're different. If they're the same, then they're the same.
 

ssloansjca

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Even in such a test as above you can expect some slight variations from batch to batch. I would not expect an exact match.
I remember back in the olden days those variations would be huge. I remember having to shoot a test roll of, say Kodachrome or E3 Ektachrome, and then buying more of the same emulsion number. Differences do not seem as pronounced these days but I suspect a densitometer may register it. I think they would be close, but my test is to print it and see if I like it.

~Steve
 

Paul Verizzo

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Let's put our thinking caps on...


Again, if it isn't behaving like TMX, it isn't TMX. Too much difference to fool the B&W community.

They would call it 100 instead of 125 because it's only a 1/3 of a stop and most medium speed films are 100. Gives a tad more safety margin, virtually a margin of error or testing procedure. Also a red herring to throw consumers off?

As bad as Kodak may be in some decision making, come on, no way did they so overproduce the T-films that Freestyle has enough to rely on, presumably, for years. Freestyle wouldn't do it for something that will run out soon. All that boxing and marketing and customer expectations.

I'm sure if I went to Kodak and said, "I want a million feet (or whatever number pricks up their ears) of 35mm film a year," they would jump. Say further, "What Plus-X and Tri-X formula variations have you tried that aren't the current ones but were very good?" Man, they would be going through their testing logs post haste.
 

Paul Verizzo

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ISO 100? 125? No real difference.

Not long ago I stumbled across the ISO film speed rating procedure. It is incredibly detailed - "Develop no less than XX minutes after exposure and no more than X hours - and uses a standardized developer not unlike, but not, D-76. In other words, it only has a faint resemblance to the real world. It's a starting place, nothing more, a point of reference.

Don't be fooled thinking that these testing procedures are so rigid that there is a real difference between 100 or 125 results. It's well known that Fuji fudges their speed and granularity tests; they have perfect conditions and then round up or down as needed. Not exactly lying......

Freestyle is well within margin of error or test interpretations to call the film a 100.
 

ssloansjca

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I think we are agreed on one thing about this "new" film is that it is made by Kodak, right? I am going to shoot a roll and see what it looks like. Will it perform underdeveloped and over processed (pushed) like TX? What will the shadows and highlights look like? What will the grain structure be?

These are questions I hope to soon get a better handle on. One other issue, I am hesitant to use films not made by the big three. I remember the DuPont films of the 40-50's where the emulsion would delaminate from the base over time which was very bad. I have never had problems like this with Kodak films. Of course if this happens with this film I will never know it. But, for some reason, I am still driven to shoot films and process to standards that I trust will enable my grandkids to be able to print my negs.

~Steve
 

Paul Howell

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Paul Verizzo

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ssloansjca said:
But, for some reason, I am still driven to shoot films and process to standards that I trust will enable my grandkids to be able to print my negs.

~Steve
Click to expand...

Your grandchildren won't know what a negative is. If, perchance, they did, they won't have equipment and products to process it.

I think wet B&W will be gone within two generations and maybe even less. As I mentioned elsewhere, there just isn't the market.
 

ssloansjca

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Do you think those digital files will be around still?

My grandchildren do know what a negative is because grandpa shows them. I use my father's camera's still. I passed a camera down to my son who still uses the camera that was once his grandfather's. Oh yes, I gave him some of that Freestyle Tri-X to shoot in it. If I have to I will deep freeze film and mix my chemicals from scratch.

I enjoy looking at old family prints from 100 years ago still. I wonder how many of my Camera RAW files will last that long?

~Steve
 

Paul Verizzo

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You are comparing apples and kumquats here, Steve.

I come from a long line of photographers, professional and otherwise, from both sides of the family. I know very well about the some 2000 photos we have, some going back to the 1880's. The oldest camera I have is a Hitler era Leica. (Shutter is slow....darned 64 year old cameras!)

Wet photography, especially of the B&W variety is at the end of it's lifespan. No matter how much we like it, to deny it is fantasy. Oh, sure, there will be a few folks out there making silver prints....as an alternative process.

You camera RAW files - or any other - will last as long as an effort is made to keep them. Certainly not as easy as putting a pile of paper photos in the shoe box (but also no silver bugs!) Just like photos can be destroyed in a fire, electronic images can also be lost or destroyed. To overcome that possibility I backup my HD every day or two or immediately after significant changes. Then every month or so I take another HD that is off premises and back up to that.

The day will come when our present computer technologies will change. But as long as we migrate accordingly, it shouldn't be a problem. It just takes foresight and a hands on approach. Which means, of course, the average digital user will lose everything within ten years. ("I didn't think that it would really, like, you know, delete everything!)

Just because you are keeping photographic knowledge alive in your family doesn't mean that your grandkids, or their kids, will. Despite our family's history in photography, I'm the only "kid" that gives a damn and I don't see it with any of mine.
 

fotch

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I read somewhere a while back that NASA burns their digital pictures to film for archiving them. True? Seemed like a good idea to me.

 

Paul Verizzo

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LOL!

fotch said:
I read somewhere a while back that NASA burns their digital pictures to film for archiving them. True? Seemed like a good idea to me.

Click to expand...

And they probably print them. Over at Walgreens.

There's a rather infamous case of some British librarians jumping on the e-bandwagon a bit too soon. This goes back to the days of actual floppy disks; i.e., they were floppy. But not the 5 1/4" (??) things, some up and coming new earthshaking mechanical format. So they scanned some of their most important books,16th century bibles and what not. But they didn't stay on top of things and the format itself became obsolete. So now, if you want to look at those books, you do it the old fashioned way: your eyeballs.

Now, this doesn't mean that digitizing is absurd. It only proves that one must choose the most archival methods (i.e., accessible years later) and stay on top of things.
 

ssloansjca

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I am going to process the film I have labeled "FTX-135-36" (Freestyle Tri-X) tonight and then will have a grand look at what this film will do when developed in D76H. Meanwhile, like I told a friend recently when he asked, why do you still shoot film?, "you can take my film camera when you pry my cold dead fingers off the shutter release."



~Steve Sloan
 

gainer

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Paul Verizzo said:
And they probably print them. Over at Walgreens.
Click to expand...
I don't know how it is now, but when I retired in 1982, NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton (NOT NSA at Langley, VA, as Law and Order CI supposed it on one episode) had a very good photo lab. They had a blind man working in the darkroom on certain things- no worries about which safelight or whether to use one. The only problem was they only used 8x10 cameras. There was a time when I had to do some technical photography with my 35 because the 8x10's couldn't get close enough without a 4 foot bellows extension and there wasn't room.
 

PHOTOTONE

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bcostin

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I've posted a few scans from my test roll of Arista Premium 400. The were shot at EI 200 - 1600, as noted in the titles of each image, and developed in Diafine. Resized by 75%, except for this one, which is at full size. No curve adjustments.

Edit: I've replaced all of the images with full-size versions.

Forgive the mundane content. And nasty white spots. They were a post-development accident, and I didn't want to mangle the grain with with dust removal.
 
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Paul Verizzo

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Thanks for being our guinea pig!


Now, how many films can hit EI 1600 in Diafine? (Or about any other 400 speed film and almost any other developer!) This almost narrows it down to (the envelope please!) Tri-X!

I presume that's at the suggested 3 minutes in each bath.

Were these prints or scans?
 

usagisakana

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Whether that's tri-x or not, those shots look fairly decent.
 
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