CatLabs 80 ASA Film

[Ari]

I just started shooting this film and I really like it so far.
I'm by no means a scientific tester, but my limited experience with this film has been uniformly positive.
The tonal range is very good, ditto the lower contrast. It scans well.

Development has been in HC-110, but I haven't settled on a proper development time yet. I expose it at 32 ASA.
I did a test to determine development time, and it yielded odd results: 8 minutes or 10/11 minutes, but not 9 minutes. Hah!

I like to use either 1:63 or my own 1:39, but with these shots, I used 1:31 and developed in a Jobo for 8 minutes.
This film sometimes looks slightly under-developed to my non-scientific eye, then it surprises me when I scan it, as it scans with no loss of detail anywhere.
Highlights are also full of detail and so far have not been irretrievably over-exposed.

Anyway, enough chit chat.

Do you have any images made with this remarkable film to share? Here are mine.
Straight scans, shot with a Fuji L 300 or a Fuji 250 f/6.7 on 8x10.

[BrianShaw]

Me too. I only shot a few sheets so far and was reasonably impressed. I processed in DD-X 1+4... 8 minutes.

Shot with Anniversary Graphic and Kodak Anastigmat 5-1/2 inch lens.

Sorry, no scans to show, though.

Really like your images!

[Ben Calwell]

I just started shooting this film and I really like it so far.
I'm by no means a scientific tester, but my limited experience with this film has been uniformly positive.
The tonal range is very good, ditto the lower contrast. It scans well.

Development has been in HC-110, but I haven't settled on a proper development time yet.
I did a test to determine development time, and it yielded odd results: 8 minutes or 10/11 minutes, but not 9 minutes. H

I like to use either 1:63 or my own 1:39, but with these shots, I used 1:31 and developed in a Jobo for 8 minutes.
This film sometimes looks slightly under-developed to my non-scientific eye, then it surprises me when I scan it, as it scans with no loss of detail anywhere.
Highlights are also full of detail and so far have not been irretrievably over-exposed.

Anyway, enough chit chat.

Do you have any images made with this remarkable film to share? Here are mine.
Straight scans, shot with a Fuji L 300 or a Fuji 250 f/6.7 on 8x10.

Glad to know it’s a decent film. I like your images.

[Ari]

Thanks, Ben. I was just tooling around the house.
Can't wait to try this film out on a real person.

[paulbarden]

Its got great tonality, but preserving shadow information is a challenge. I rate it at 25ASA to accomplish that. I have recently adopted Crawley's FX-37 developer designed especially for T-grain type films (but is also excellent on traditional grain slow films) and I may try CatLabs X 80 in FX-37. Why? Because FX-37 provides a speed boost of 1/2 to 1 stop compared to other developers, and I have verified this by comparing it with D-76 and Atomal49. Nice thing about FX-37 is that development times are much shorter than most any other developer (think 5 to 7 minutes for many)
But beware! If you ever get into reciprocity territory, you're in for a real shock!

[Ari]

Beautiful, Paul. I didn't realize this was shot on CatLabs.

Yes, I forgot to mention that I'm using it at 32 ASA all the time. I'll edit my first post.
I think that's based on a post you wrote a while back.
Anyway, 32 ASA gives enough wiggle room to bring out shadows or fade them to black.
With the Arista EDU I've been using, that choice is narrower. Often I'd have to strike just the right balance between reining in highlights and not making the shadows too dense.

[Ari]

If you ever get into reciprocity territory, you're in for a real shock!

Speaking of, where can I get reciprocity information?
Thanks

EDIT: just found a review where the author successfully used Ilford FP4 as a starting point for reciprocity times.

[paulbarden]

Beautiful, Paul. I didn't realize this was shot on CatLabs.

Yes, I forgot to mention that I'm using it at 32 ASA all the time. I'll edit my first post.
I think that's based on a post you wrote a while back.
Anyway, 32 ASA gives enough wiggle room to bring out shadows or fade them to black.
With the Arista EDU I've been using, that choice is narrower. Often I'd have to strike just the right balance between reining in highlights and not making the shadows too dense.

I have just processed 2 sheets of X 80 in FX-37. Its hard to say whether or not I got a better speed performance using FX-37 or not because I didn't have extra sheets to compare with another developer. I'll scan these and see what I think. My recollection was that I exposed these at about 25ASA.

Speaking of, where can I get reciprocity information?
Thanks

EDIT: just found a review where the author successfully used Ilford FP4 as a starting point for reciprocity times.

That might be OK up until you get to 5 seconds and beyond. My experience is that it gets really unreasonable after that. Like, 10 seconds turns into 3 minutes, sort of thing.

[Ari]

Like, 10 seconds turns into 3 minutes, sort of thing.

Eep.

[paulbarden]

OK, so I scanned the better of the two sheets of X 80 (which was the longer exposure, meaning rated at less than 20 ASA) and I like some things about it, tonally, but for the second time, I've encountered odd random mottling across the whole sheet: pale blurry blobs in the upper-middle values. Not at all impressed. I exposed this image 3 months ago and just now got to processing it, but I've seen these marks appear on film I had processed the same day as I exposed it, so....
I disguised the problem a bit in post processing by dialing down the texture in the mid tones, but you can still see all the weird blobs in the zone 6/7 values. A shame, because I like this image. Now I just wish I'd done it on FP4 instead.



Here's a larger version, in which you can more clearly see the mottling effect.