Back in Spring of ’21 I purchased a 410ft can of out-of-date Ilford FP4+ movie film. As far as I can tell it’s exactly the same as regular FP4, although, as it’s intended to rattle through a movie camera at 18 inches a second – give or take, it does have subtly different (slightly rounded) perforations.
My first issue was one of scale – 400ft won’t fit in my bulk loader! I had to sit in the dark and decant about 100ft onto a core that would fit! I’ve done this twice more since that first sitting. I got down to my last few rolls and decided I’d finish the job this last weekend and loaded in the last 100ft ish. I’ve kept a note of how many 36 exposure films I got out of it – 76! I also got a 12 exp, and a 20 exp and an initial test length.
My first test was to add on the usual 1 stop for age, but I found that this gave me slightly heavy negs, ever since I’ve just treated it as fresh stock and it’s been fine! In fact I’ve even shot a few rolls of fresh FP4+ and can’t tell the difference, so dear friends if you have any slightly out dated FP4, i.e. 25 years or less – just carry on and enjoy using it! Slight caveat would be that there was something in the wording of the Ebay listing that gave me the impression that it was being sold by the daughter of a gentleman who once worked at Ilford. I imagined that he may have purchased a can or two for his retirement and never got around to this one. The point is, if that was true, one would hope he would have known how to store it well – that seems the case.
So that’s it, all loaded into 35mm cassettes, ready to use, I now have about 20 rolls left to use this year then onto the next can of film!
As a footnote I see this can cost me £35:20 with postage, so that works out at approx. 46p a roll! Wow – film photography is so cheap! 🙂
S.H.O.U.T. 