Topic: Does Arista.EDU/Fomapan 400 do 1600?

[Francois]

I know this question is on everybody's lips.
So, being the only one here with some Arista.EDU 400 in stock, I decided to answer the age old question: Does it do 1600?
So, I exposed an whole roll at 1600 and developed in some pretty old HC-110 (dil.B). The film was exposed in a camera I haven't used in a long time (Minolta X-370) using lenses I never used before. I used times found on the Massive Dev Chart.
Agitation wise, I went a bit soft as I didn't want excessive contrast.

To my surprise, the negatives came out relatively gray-ish to the point where I sometimes had a hard time telling one frame apart from the next.
There was a dark band across the sprockets which is probably camera related (even though it looks too even for that... I'm going to have to investigate).

The pictures needed a curve adjustment in Photoshop (I just used xnConvert to do a batch job) in order to get decent results out of that cheap instant scanner I always use. So your results will most probably be better when using Epson Scan or something similar.

So, here are 8 selected from the roll...
What do you think?

[Francois]

And here are some more.

[Indofunk]

As someone who typically shoots 400 film at 1600, I say they came out well. But if you think you did too much post processing to get them to look like that, I'd suggest a couple of things.

1. Stand develop
2. Use a different film stock 🤣

[Kai-san]

According to Massive Dev Chart you can run Fomapan 400 at 3200 ISO, stand develop in Fomadon R09 (Rodinal) for 70 minutes. Have not tried it, I mostly hate grainy film.

[Francois]

I was using some HC-110 that was starting to get that nice amber glow...
I would have used Rodinal but I didn't feel like spending the 22 minutes the chart said agitating...

Strangely, I feel that there is some potential there. The D-Max is quite reasonable. There is some detail, though it can be quite faint. The grain isn't too bad.

If the camera didn't have some shot light seals, it would have been a lot better.

For a film that is probably a real ISO 250 from the factory, it's pretty darn good.

[Francois]

OK, I did a small test, but this time with an unlikely developer.
Back in the old days, newspaper reporters used to take Tri-X, shoot it at 3200 and develop for 6 minutes at 70°F in Dektol.
The punks used to do HP5 in PQ Universal.
So I replicated the experiment on a short film strip.
Since I wasn't sure if the meter would give me a proper result, I used the meter reading for the 1600 frame, 800 for the second and 3200 for the last.
I sloshed the Arista.EDU 400 in PQ Universal (I think it's the 1+9 dilution) for 6 minutes at 72°F.
The instructions say it's double the time for FB paper... so I could have gotten away with 4 minutes in theory.
I did a few minutes of pre-wash so that the emulsion is ready to absorb the chems more readily.

The scans are of the cheap kind. I minimally adjusted the histograms to get a good dark. Midtones are pretty much as they fall. Didn't need to fiddle with the highlights.

Is that better?