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People have been asking about using the SP-8x10 for color processing. The real question is: "how do you control the temperature?" So we ran a thermal profile of the tray. The procedure is pretty simple: Fill the tray with water at the desired temperature and presoak for 1 minute. Empty and refill with water at the desired processing temperature. We mounted a digital thermometer probe inside the tray and recorded the temperature over a 30 minute period.   You can see the results below (click the image to open the pdf):   As expected, the temperature dropped over time but...

I recently bought a Wista 8x10 field camera (it will be the subject of another review). It was a package deal that included a Komura 210mm, f/6.3 lens, that is supposed to cover 8x10 without much movement (I haven't tested that yet). Didn't think much about it since I already had a really nice Rodenstock 210 mm, f/5.6. The Rodenstock has been one of my favorite lenses for a long time, so I figured I'd dump the Komura on a popular auction site and be done with it. Then I opened the package. I confess that I was a bit...

UPDATE: here's a link to our Foma Data page: https://shop.stearmanpress.com/pages/film-data-foma Overview: We've been testing FomaPan 200 Creative with our SP-76EC developer. The above curves are from a standard 21 step tablet and measured with a densitometer. All shots taken with a calibrated shutter. Click above to download a larger version. The Film: Foma boasts that this is a new generation film. It features hexagonal core/shell tabular silver halide grains that is supposed to have better resolving power and lower granularity. So kind of like TMax but only kind of. What we've seen so far, we like. However, we really wanted...

It's a long story but I've accidentally acquired 300' of Kodak Tri-X 35mm film. It expired in 1993 but had been stored in a sealed plastic tub in a basement up in the Colorado mountains. Now what? Frankly, I don't shoot much 35mm (so don't ask why I went to the effort to "acquire" this. I just couldn't resist.)  Anyway, I've shot a few rolls (at ISO 200) and played around with developers.     It's a bit grainy (no surprise), lots of fog (0.64 according to my densitometer) but it's still usable. The above were processed in Xtol 1:1;...

We've been playing with Kodak's Ektascan Xray film. Cool stuff. It has a tabular grain (rumor is that it's the same emulsion as their TMax but without the panchromatic dyes) and is single sided. And cheap, about a buck a sheet for 8x10. Of course, it's orthochromatic and we were curious about its spectral response but couldn't find anything definitive on the web. So we did a quick test. Here's the standard Macbeth color checker as seen by Ektascan (we added the labels.) In case you forgot, here's the color version:  As you can see, (unless you're color blind), Ektascan...