Loosing Technical Pan...Who Will Really Miss It?

[Francesco]

I used to shoot with a myriad of B&W films, TP included. Now I only shoot with 2, TP excluded, neither of them are made by Kodak. Good riddance to Kodak. They will rue the day they decide to get out of B&W film altogether. May it never come.

Francesco (www.cicoli.com)

[jantman]

I've never tried TechPan yet, though I most definately wanted (and want) to. I guess now I'll have to pick up a few rolls in 120.

Once I started shooting Ilford Pan F+ 50 (in Ilfosol-S) for my fine-grain rollfilm needs, I never saw a reason to try TechPan - the Pan F did everything I wanted, and I was never in a situation that needed finer grain.

I guess I'll pick up a few rolls, and throw some in the freezer... I wish I did that with AgfaPan 25.

[Jim Galli]

Won't be missed here. Far too fussy for me. And anyways I have about 5" X 1000+ feet of Aerial Panatomic X in the freezer. ASA 32 and the same grain structure that Kodak developed the tech pan from. Also red sensitive, and easily chopped into 5X7 lengths. I don't think Kodak will recover. Too many bad decisions early on in the digital conversion. Too top heavy and old fashioned to cope. A shame, another old American Standard suffering. At work we are currently finding a third of a million $ to buy 35mm Kodak Ektachrome that will vanish at the end of this year. Our conversion to digital is under way but we have much old machinery that we need to keep going for some years into the future.

[CXC]

I've shot TechPan in 120, cuz I like heavy contrast and sharp edges. Never could afford it in LF sizes. If the price goes down, rather than up (can you say Agfa Ultra?), after discontinuation, I might stock up. When was it last available in 5x7?

[Jon Mowe]

Nobody has mentioned that technical pan scans wonderfully. I have been using technical pan for this purpose exclusively for several years and had made it my standard film. It also has a look for both portraits and landscapes that is very unique and I will miss it greatly. The only thing that comes close to the scanning capabilities as far as indistinct grain is slide film (a distant cousin), but the quality is not even close.

[ohad_drucker]

I made a comparison between very old rolls of technical pan and new ones. I found that maybe technical pan film is not so dead after all, because the stocks of tech pan which are still available are still very usable ( I found stocks of 35mm and 70mm long roll, but I'm sure that most of the other formats are also still available ).

Check it out at:
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/...an-drucker.pdf

[Donald Qualls]

I don't really understand the fuss about Tech Pan -- only in 120 is there a real loss; there are microfilm stocks in 35 mm (and 16 mm, and microfiche sizes that can be recut to 4x5) that do everything Tech Pan did except the extended red sensitivity and gas hypering (the latter a largely obsolete process anyway, with the reciprocity characteristics of Acros 100 being what they are and the film two stops faster).

I've been using microfilms for some time in subminiature, and have recently tried one of them in 35 mm -- it's certainly tempting to get a pack of the Imagelink J&C sells, because it looks to me as if it's close to making Tech Pan obsolete anyway (and isn't going anywhere, because microfilm is still selling in volume).

[paulr]

I read that when developed as a continuous tone film, tech pan actually lags behind tmx in MTF performance. Athough I don't know this for sure.

I also haven't used tech pan, so I don't know what its unique look is ... I'm guessing it's pretty unique, since it's designed as a high contrast film. a regular probably couldn't duplicate its tonal qualities. but does anyone rave about its tonal qualities?

[JW Dewdney]

For example, in their southwest workshops both John Sexton and Don Kirby teach a method for using it to photograph petroglyphs, where there often is no more a stop difference between the colors in the petroglyphs and the underlying rock.

Using tech pan for this application doesn't make ANY sense to me at all! It's far more red-sensitive than pretty much any film out there, apart from IR films. Most rock art is painted in a red ochre - so unless the rock was very dark... I don't see how that would work.

The KILLER APP for tech pan, though, IMHO - is astrophotography, believe it or not. You need multiple 20min plus exposures - but I've seen some PHENOMENAL stuff being done with medium format tech pan in a hasselblad.

[Arne Croell]

Using tech pan for this application doesn't make ANY sense to me at all! It's far more red-sensitive than pretty much any film out there, apart from IR films. Most rock art is painted in a red ochre - so unless the rock was very dark... I don't see how that would work.

This technique (TP in regular TMAX developer) for rock art photography was not about the color sensitivity, which could be taken care of by something like a bluegreen filter. It was about the ability of extreme contrast enhancement in development as pointed out above. Something like N+4 would not be possible with many standard films, and even then the grain would be very pronounced. I learned this in one of John's workshops, too, and it does work.