I see some familiar names in the "what films are being made" area (FP4, HP5, TMax 100/400, etc) but quite a few that I just don't know (Foma? Adox? Some others). Is there any good resource that talks about some of these different films, anyone who has either tested a good number of them or collected links to such testing? I'm hoping there's a thread here that I just haven't found yet.
Am I right in assuming things like "FP4 and HP5 are the same as they've always been" to start with?
Let me start by quoting my favorite Carly Simon song:
These are the good old days!
I got back into film in 2019 after a twenty-or-so-year hiatus. I mostly shoot B&W, mostly 35 and some 120. (Back in the day I only shot 35.)
FP4+ and HP5+ are the same, or at least close enough to what I remember. I understand Tri-X has been reformulated but I don't remember if it's much different (I was more of a TMax guy back in the day). Plus-X is gone. T-Max may be a little different but acts the same; I believe is the same for Delta, Ilford's tabular-grain film. While I'm a former Rochestarian, I mostly shoot Ilford films; Kodak is pricier an the negatives curl which make it harder to scan on my flatbed Epson. Biggest difference is that you don't need a hardening fixer, though I'm not sure if we ever did. I use Ilford Rapid Fixer, which has a fast three-step rinse.
D-76 is the same, as is HC-110, and so are the Ilford developers.
As you've seen, there are lots of new films you might not have heard of, or which were common in other parts of the world. Foma is interesting, gritty, grainy stuff, though I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. Haven't used Adox yet. I think my favorite discovery is Kentmere, made by the same folks who make Ilford. I like it a lot and it's cheaper than HP5 and FP4. I really liked Ultrafine XTreme, too, but I don't think it's been around much since the pandemic. (Some thought it was rebadged Kentmere or Ilford, but no one is quite sure.) For low light, HP5+ pushed two stops to 1600 is my go-to.
I find some changes in my own tastes: I used to shoot tab-grain because of the resolution, but now it looks too digital to me -- if I want that high a level of detail, I can use my Sony a6000. I tend to stick with the traditional grain films.
Developing is better, there's a thing called the Massive Dev Chart (Google it) with combos for all films and developers, though it's community-developed and I prefer to go with the manufacturers' data sheets and only use the MDC if I can't find one. Data sheets are easy to find too, thank you Interwebs.
Lots of film reviews out there, many from young film newbies, and I say take 'em all with a grain of salt. People shoot and (more importantly) develop differently, so they don't get consistent results, and they also seem to forget that negatives are not slides, and that they do not determine final image quality -- they grew up in the age of scanning (often done by labs), so they don't realize that we wanted maximum
information in our negatives and could adjust contrast, exposure, etc. in the printing process (and can also do that to our scans, better still if we scan ourselves). My opinion; Buy a roll of everything and a container of D-76, break out your old developing tanks and reels and decide for yourself what you like.
Color neg supplies have been a bit sketchy since the pandemic, and prices are up a bit for B&W, but it's still a great time to be shooting film: Plenty of cameras out there, some bargains (though some still overpriced), all the chemicals you could want, and a massive community filled with both old-timers and young people doing exciting new things. And if you simply do what you did in the 1990s, you'll still be fine.
Welcome to the new Golden Age of Film!
Aaron