Foma 200?

[koraks]

A good chunk of Foma's market for camera film products seems to like to (quite loudly) portray themselves as more price than quality sensitive - you can draw your own conclusions from that as to how tied Foma's hands are.

Alright, but that brings up the question how useful it is to keep a product around that's fundamentally flawed. It's a bit like marketing a very cheap car, "but don't take it out onto the highway, because the bonnet will pop off and you may lose a wheel or two." Of course I understand that financial limitations may play a big role in Foma not being able to re-engineer Foma 200 in 120 format so that it actually works reliably. As a company, don't you sometimes have to conclude that something just doesn't fly and that it's perhaps better to not go there? Given how people respond to this, I'd think it makes sense to just discontinue the product. Just look at this thread; half the people are stating that they won't use Foma only because this particular product doesn't work, regardless of the fact that the other products in the lineup don't suffer from this problem. There's a clear spillover effect to their entire brand reputation.

[tokyo_blues]

Here's a decent read

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26629722

Quoting from the abstract,

Online product reviews help consumers infer product quality, and the mean (average) rating is often used as a proxy for product quality. However, two self-selection biases, acquisition bias (mostly consumers with a favorable predisposition acquire a product and hence write a product review) and underreporting bias (consumers with extreme, either positive or negative, ratings are more likely to write reviews than consumers with moderate product ratings), render the mean rating a biased estimator of product quality, and they result in the well-known J-shaped (positively skewed, asymmetric, bimodal) distribution of online product reviews.

If you're enjoying something, and getting on with it, you're less likely to reach for the closest keyboard and vent.

[iml]

FWIW, I have shot a lot of Foma 100 in 8x10 and 4x5 sheets over the years and never had any problems with it at all, it's a very decent film. Anecdotally I have heard that Foma 200 is less reliable, but I never saw the point of it anyway. Foma 100 rated at EI 64 in Pyrocat HD works just fine, I never saw the need for an ISO 200 sheet film that seems to be closer to EI 100, given that Foma 100 exists and isn't significantly slower.

[Daniel Unkefer]

I like using FOMA films from time to time, have some to use up. But I don't think I would use it for any photo making that is not repeatable. DON'T like how it curls tightly at all

[Rick A]

I've been shooting Foma 100 in medium and LF for years with no issues other than the ones I created. I've been trying Foma 200 in my 5x7 for about a year now and still can't wrap my brain around it, as in I still am not satisfied with any of my results. I haven't tried it in medium format, in fact I won't be since I'm selling my MF camera and only shooting LF these days. My developer of choice is PMK Pyro.

[Havoc]

I've been shooting Foma 100 in medium and LF for years with no issues other than the ones I created. I've been trying Foma 200 in my 5x7 for about a year now and still can't wrap my brain around it, as in I still am not satisfied with any of my results.

Care to tell us what you can't wrap your head around?

[paulbarden]

I've been shooting Foma 100 in medium and LF for years with no issues other than the ones I created. I've been trying Foma 200 in my 5x7 for about a year now and still can't wrap my brain around it, as in I still am not satisfied with any of my results. I haven't tried it in medium format, in fact I won't be since I'm selling my MF camera and only shooting LF these days. My developer of choice is PMK Pyro.

Some emulsions simply do not play nice when developed in PMK. Perhaps that is what you are seeing?

[Mark Sampson]

One thing to learn from all this is that manufacturing B&W film is an extremely complicated and difficult endeavor. In my past career I was lucky to occasionally work with Kodak's film designers and production engineers. The amount of institutional knowledge, and the skills and dedication of the personnel, were truly amazing.
I'd already been working for the company for some years, and had made my living using Kodak film from the start, yet it was a revelation to find out just how complex the process of making film is. Of course Kodak's resources were enormous, and a great deal of research was done before releasing a new product. Equally true, they didn't always get it right (I'm sure many of us would have stories to tell), but EK was able to dominate the industry for a hundred years, partly because of the reliable quality of their film and materials.
Back on topic, it's likely that Foma lacks the resources to fix the issues described with their 200 film. i'm sure they want to provide a top-quality product, but no one is perfect.
For the record, I have not used any Foma film, but do enjoy using their paper, and I wish them success.
And anyone who has an interest in all this should find a copy of Bob Shanebrook's essential book, "Making Kodak Film", at makingkodakfilm.com, IIRC.

[Drew Wiley]

PMK works fine for Foma 200 development. That was never an issue for me, but the poor quality control and miserable long exposure characteristics. Recalibrating PMK mentality for this film is mainly a matter of recognizing how this film develops especially fast, along with fact it is nowhere near 200 box speed.

Trying to make comparisons to Foma 100 and 400 is not realistic, since the 200 product has a very different, especially long straight line characteristic curve.

[Scott Davis]

I've been shooting Foma 100 in medium and LF for years with no issues other than the ones I created. I've been trying Foma 200 in my 5x7 for about a year now and still can't wrap my brain around it, as in I still am not satisfied with any of my results. I haven't tried it in medium format, in fact I won't be since I'm selling my MF camera and only shooting LF these days. My developer of choice is PMK Pyro.

A: try switching to Pyrocat HD.
B: make sure you rate it at 100 when exposing, not 200. It is NOT a 200 speed film, all of Foma's protestations to the contrary.
C: as Drew noted, it develops extremely fast. My experience has been 7 minutes @ 75F in a Jobo rotary processor running at the slowest available speed, vs 11 for FP4+ in the same circumstances. This is developing for printing Palladium. You may need to cut the time to 6 minutes if you are only printing silver.