[Leica] film question

[tgray at 125px.com (Tim Gray)]

On Apr 02, 2012 at 01:42 AM +0930, Marty Deveney wrote:
>On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Tim Gray <tgray at 125px.com> wrote:
>> What always confuses me is that T-MAX 100 wasn't mentioned.  Also a good
>> film.
>
>I don't mention it because it also has (to me) a somewhat odd spectral
>response:

Understood.  The T-Max films do have a different spectral sensitivity, 
but in my experience, most films differ in this respect.  Actually, 
Techpan had extended red response, so if that's important to the 
original poster, I'm not sure any of these is a good match.

I wasn't really only pointing the finger at you.  More of a statement 
about these kinds of discussions online.  T-Max 100 always seems to be 
left out.

I saw a comparison between these four films on rangefinderforum a couple 
months ago.  Unfortunately, the scans are no longer on line.  The films 
weren't identified at first and people guessed which picture was which 
film.  It was interesting to see what people guessed - they placed their 
favorite films with the pictures they liked the most.  One of the scans 
looked noticeably worse than the others (could have been the 
development, the film, or the scanning) and that was the one that 
several people said was T-Max.  The one that many people liked the most 
was the actual T-Max shot though most people thought it was something 
else.  Once the results were revealed, several people were shocked to 
find out how grainy the PanF+ actually was.

Of course, it was more of a test of those four films, developed in the 
manner they were developed, and scanned the way they were scanned.  I'm 
sure the one film that looked bad could have looked much better had it 
been developed differently.  What I thought was interesting is that the 
test seemed to highlight a bias against T-Max films by many.

Obviously, if you don't like T-Max 100, you are free to not like it.  
All of these four films are probably different enough from Techpan in 
various ways that I'd rather just mention all four and try not to let my 
biases enter in.