Been wanting to shoot more B&W film this summer. I recently gave Silvermax a try but somehow that didn't work for me. I'm sure it would've if I gave it a bit more thought or tried their dedicated developer. But! Silvermax is not readily available in Japan. There's only one online retailer in Japan that sells this film and it's out of stock right now. It's summer and I wanna shoot. So this didn't work for me and I decided to give Acros a try.
Acros is readily available in Japan and it's cheap (585 yen/roll) . I know Fuji recently announced the discontinuation of Acros but it is still available now.
I decided to just stick to D-76 1+1 for my developer. I expect to shoot this film only in harsh contrast on sunny days anyways.
Basic Test:
- Find rough developing time
- Shoot test shoots at different EI
- enlarge test shoots onto paper and pick best one.
As you can see from the above tests, this film works best at an exposure beteeen 75-100 ISO. At 100 the final print is too dark. At 75 I get prints that don’t look dark anymore and at 12:30 mins developing time I get nice contrasty highlights without the need to burn anything in.
This film is very fine grained in D76 1+1. Maybe a little too fine grained for my taste. I usually only print on 5x7 and at this size the film just looks too clean. For bigger enlargements it is probably a nice choice. If that works for you I highly recommend this film. Get it while you can. Fuji stopped making B&W films and it’s only a matter of time until the current stock runs out. This is the end of a long era. Fuji Neopan films were superb!