Which film is the lowest grain at box speed? (that is still sold today)

[Lachlan Young]

I would add a strong caveat: modern inkjet print heads can do a lot better in terms of detail resolution than people assume - but not at very high productivity levels. Most of the time the 'differences' people are seeing between certain emulsions are artefacts of bad scanning and inversion habits, compounded by inkjet printing mindsets that either don't care about meaningful resolution (and love to grossly oversharpen) - or that have alternatively wandered so far into largely irrelevant territories of gamut top-trumps and increasingly eccentric pseudo-archival beliefs to try and find excuses for not being able to actually perceive what a good print looks like.

Not that darkroom printing is short of techniques to fairly radically alter saturation and sharpness too - and a good scan should respect the fundamental character of the material being scanned, as it makes subsequent work more readily coherent, no matter where it goes.

Either way, for the print sizes most people on here seem to work to, they'd be best off ignoring the nominal granularity (and realistically, resolution) of the material and going on the colour, latitude & speed that they need.

 

[DREW WILEY]

You and I agree on a lot of things, Lachlan. But we're also in a different world. 8x10 film changes the name of the game. And inkjet is inherently limited even in gamut by the fact only certain ink colors can pass through those tiny nozzles. Every other requirement is secondary, and some kind of compromise. They can be lovely for certain subjects, but are not a good match for my own work because I not only want full detail out of even my MF roll film shots, but really prefer the transparency of dyes (vs the opacity of inks). Plus I operate full optical workflow - that's very important to me. No scans, no PS tomfoolery.