Ilford FP4 - 120 Rollfilm

Due to lucky circumstances I was able to acquire a box of 100 rolls of Ilford FP4 recently. Unfortunately there was no expiration date printed anywhere, but since it was discontinued in 1990 and replaced by the FP4+, it’s safe to assume that it is at least 30 years old by the time of writing. Storage is mostly unknown. The only information the seller could provide me with was, that he found it tucked away in a cabinet behind an elevator shaft.

Judging by previous experiments, 30 years is usually the limit of usability. Beyond that, artefacts just become too dominant for my taste. Let us take a closer look then into how this one performs after this time.

EXPOSURE

Coming fresh from the factory, this film had an ISO of 125, but the assumption was, that it had lost some of its sensitivity. I shot a series of images; taking an exposure for ISO 50 as baseline (0) and went +1 and +2 from there to see, how it would handle corrections.

Flughafensee Tegel shot on expired Ilford FP4 film — Measured for optimal exposure and has set middle-gray exactly at the middle of the scale.

Exposed for Hightlights and high contrast

Tree in Forrest at Flughafensee Tegel shot on expired Ilford FP4 film — Exposed for Shadows and low contrast

Imagine my surprise when I looked at the results and there were no dominant artifacts, not even fog on the negatives. There is plenty of detail in the shadows and exposure corrections were taken over as if it was new. But as you will see in the following section: that’s not the end of this story just yet.

Development

The film that you see above has been developed with one of my favorite developers: SPUR Acurol-N for ISO 50. But different films react to different developers, so besides testing exposure limits, we should also take a look at different developers to get a better understanding for how this film performs.

The 3 different developers for this test were:

SPUR Acurol-N
Kodak D-76 (couldn’t leave out the classic)
510 Pyro

Since we have already seen the results using Acurol-N, let us start by diving into that one first. As you can see from the above shots, there is a lot of texture at play, which could easily hide spots on the negatives. So I took a shot on an evenly dark background and pushed the resulting scan a bit in Photoshop.

As you can see we have quite a bit of noise going on here. Nothing dramatic, and if you overexpose it by 2 stops and develop it accordingly, this wouldn’t be visible, but nevertheless: we can clearly see the aging. Since it is an “organic“ pattern though I think it adds to the character of this particular film.

Next up is Kodak’s D-76; undoubtedly one of the classics. Since it is a low-contrast developer the expectation is, that any noise will be less pronounced, but what I wasn’t expecting is the fact, that it changed the noise pattern quite significantly. Take a look at this enhanced and pushed crop below.

While the results produced by Acurol-N are more like “a cloudy night sky“, Kodak D-76 has more of a “dripping“ character and seems to create lines. At the same time it’s also less pronounced (the gradient is part of the original image and not an artifact).

The final test was performed using 510-Pyro; a developer that is rarely found anywhere anymore. It is a staining and tanning developer that is said to have very fine grain and without blown-out highlights. So what would it be able to do with this old Ilford FP4?

Exposed as ISO 50 and developed as ISO 125 (although this can be ignored because of the development technique)

We still see the same pattern as we saw with Acurol-N, but it’s less pronounced (I pushed the contrast more than in the other example to show the structure better).

Preferred Treatment

Component

510-Pyro

SPUR Ultrafix N

Dilution

1+500

1+7

Time

50 minutes (semi stand)

9 minutes

Conclusion

So is this film still usable and any good after this long time? In my opinion it most definitely is. It still shows plenty of detail across the entire spectrum and the spots give it a very unique character. I would use it for almost any assignment without hesitation.

“Process before Oct. 1970”

The first roll of ORWO NP15 that I shot a couple of months back was said to expire in 1970, which means it has surpassed it’s recommended date by more than 50 years at the time of writing.

As with any old film stock, I have no idea how it was stored or where, but I could still deduce from the state of the roll, which just from its outer appearance has gone yellow and the spool is showing signs of rust, that it had probably been “mistreated“ for the better part of its existence. Truth be told: I have absolutely no expectations in regards to the result. Nevertheless, I am rolling it up and going on a trip to try it out.

Berlin shhot on expired ORWO NP15 film — Weather: Completely overcast
Top to bottom: +4, +3, +2

Flughafensee Tegel shot on expired ORWO NP15 film — Weather: Cloudy with some sun coming through
Top to bottom: +4, +3, +2

Right from the start you can see a couple of (very typical) defects going on:

Fogging - the entire film is heavily clouded; this is the overlaying structure you can see which looks like it had been double exposed.

Light Bleeds - nearly all vertical edges of the film have been exposed to light prior to being exposed by the camera. This is also very common if the film has been laying around without the plastic wrap.

Damaged Emulsion - visible as dark spots throughout all images.

But besides that, I am impressed, that it did that well. This particular roll of film has obviously suffered a lot due to storage, and still it was possible to get recognisable images from it. Looking at the above results I would probably go for overexposing the ORWO NP15 by 4 stops on a cloudy day and 3 stops on brighter days. Now, if we setup a rule of thumb (as the one mentioned earlier) it should probably be:

1 stop of overexposure for every 15 years past expiration

Developing 50 year old ORWO NP15

This part was quite challenging as well, since there are no official recipes on how to handle this film. After some semi-successful research I decided on the following recipe:

Component

Kodak D-76

Adox Stop (60% acetic acid)

Adox Adofix

Dilution

1+1

1+19

1+4

Time

32 minutes

1 minute

7 minutes

Looking back it might have been better to use an HC developer (like Kodak HC-110 or Ilfotec HC), since it also counters the fog to a certain degree. This assumption is also based on this blog entry (German only), which was the only article I could find on the development of this particular type of film. He uses a combination of Kodak HC-110 and Rodinal, which I will try out with the next roll.

Conclusion

Would I use this film for any project where the taken shots were indispensable? Absolutely not. But that doesn’t stop me from shooting the remaining roles and even acquiring more of this stock. As always with expired film there is no guarantee for anything, but since I was able to pull images even from this poorly treated roll of film, getting my hands on some properly stored ones is worth it in my mind. The unpredictability of the result captures the soul of this long discontinued and over-aged stock.