Kentmere 400 vs. HP5: DEEP DIVE film comparison!
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- Here's the link for high-res downloads, notes and more! / kentmere-400-vs-102626795
Timestamps:
0:01 - Conclusion first
0:49 - What is Kentmere 400?
2:09 - Curmudgeonly rant
2:49 - Antagonistic statements
5:28 - What film tests actually tell you
6:15 - The equipment
7:40 - The procedure
8:47 - The development
10:18 - The results
29:12 - Conclusion and philosophy of use
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Couldn't have really been a better time for you to post this video for me- woke up this morning thinking about this exact topic. Thanks for the detailed dive!
Glad you found it useful!
Just, thinking about Kenmare400.
Your last 3 minutes summed it up pretty well. My biggest complaint is film prices. The price and difference between Delta400 and HP-5+ is eyebrow Raising. Film companies are ringing out every last penny.
One problem with almost all film comparisons is the scanning. There is no such thing as "not modified scan", as all of the computer programs will interpret the picture - for better or worse. Printing in darkroom would be better, because everything is done then manually, and you know exactly, what has been done. The exposure, aperture, choice of contrast in black & white or color correction in RA-4, dodging, burning, etc. are all done manually, and not automatically by any software trying to make the images "better than they really are" - with varying results. I do realize that most of the young generation hobbyists are not interested in anything but digital images in their computers they scan form their films, but if you really want to know what your film is doing, print it manually to a quality paper - such as Ilford papers for black and white, and Fuji DP II for color.
Thank you for such detail and information on this film. It was a bit over my head on some parts, but well worth the time.
The problem here is you are using KODAK's recommended development times for these films; not ILFORD's.
It is a well-documented problem that BOTH these companies routinely give bad or incorrect development time suggestions for each others' films.
If you were to use an Ilford equivalent of Kodak Xtol developer, for example, Ilfotec DD-X, you will see the suggested development times from Ilford are quite different:
lfotec DD-X @ 1:4
Ilford HP5: 9:00
Kentmere 400: 11:30
Which is of course in line with Ilford's own statement that the Kentmere emulsion contains significantly less silver. So why on earth would you give these two different films the same development time? Especially based on a recommendation from their competitor, KODAK?
Again, these are the recommended development in Ilford ID-11, the Kodak D-76 equivalent:
ID-11 (1+1):
Ilford HP5: 13:00
Kentmere 400: 16:30
Personally I develop in stock ID-11:
Ilford HP5: 7:30
Kentmere 400: 9:30
(data source: Massive Dev Chart)
So yes, of course the shadows will be crushed and there will be less latitude if the film is underdeveloped.
Apart from this fundamental error, your video provides an excellent and thorough review and comparison that clearly shows these two film stocks are NOT the same (in case there was any doubt). And yes, even when properly developed the Kentmere is not as good as HP5+, but this video does not show that.
We get what we pay for.
100% i love that ketmere, even pushed to 800iso, sure the details are "trash" compared to hp5+ but i think for the daily shooting ketmere is awesome if you know how to use it
I am using it now in a 40 years old Vivitar PS:35 DX point & shoot that cost me $15. I haven't finished the roll yet. I've been using film since 1977. I am pretty sure it'll come out in black & white.
I’d like to know more about your film digitizing setup. What material do you use as a diffuser? What aperture do you shoot at?
That was really helpful, the best comparison I’ve seen online with those two films! I was shooting a lot of HP5 getting great images, but tried K400 and started to get less good photos in a roll, so in the end HP5 is the winner! I think K400 still good, but in harsh light it doesn’t work as well as HP5
Thank you for this video
Thanks for watching! More to come!
That rant is worth the subscribe lol
Thank you. You’re like the Lewis Black voice in my mind telling me this daily. ❤
@grainydaysss pushed Kentmere 400 to 3200 and compared it to Delta 3200. And Kentmere 400 looked much better.
Excellent comparison video even if some of the manoeuvres in PS left me cold ! Your conclusions chime with my own use of these in 120. It'd be very interesting to see how the sharpness/acuity comparison varies with different developers. I'm thinking particularly of 510-Pyro , Iford DD-X and ID11/D76. A further ponderable would be how much of these differences would be seen in darkroom printing. That 50/1.8 AI long nose is damn sharp...
I'm getting a lot of criticism from other sources about not using various developers, and, outside of being annoyed at the "well actuallies," it really does make me want to try other devs. I standardized on XTOL 20 years ago and have never had regrets, but sometimes . . .
Thankyou for posting the video however, Not an apples to apples comparison.
This is a pretty poor showing of kentmere by the fact that it looks very under developed. I would urge you to re-do this test with correctly developed negatives for a fair and honest update.
The sharpness between the two films again is not a fair comparison either. Any acutance from the developer will of effected the HP5 more due to again the developing issue. Only after this has been sorted can a fair difference be looked at.
I agree: this is a fair point. My development times for HP5+ and Kentmere 400 in stock ID-11 are 7:30 and 9:30 respectively, so I don't know where the "same development times" statement comes from. However if this video was aimed at showing the differences between HP5+ and Kentmere, i.e. to demonstrate that they are NOT the same film (in case there was any doubt) then developing them in the same tank certainly put paid to that myth.
Having said that, even after developing Kentmere for substantially longer than HP5+, it still shows some of the shortcomings demonstrated here, eg. lower latitude and generally a lower-density negative. Ilford themselves say it has less silver than HP5+. The newer Tri-X emulsions also have a lower silver content than the old-school emulsions. Sadly that's the way things are going. It's cost cutting.
Got here lurking from Reddit. Great TL:DR and specially the takeaway... with time, photos become unvaluable. The thing missing is comparison on print and IMO a big reason why to shoot (BW) film is to optically print.
Hipsters sunning around wearing beanies and shooting old cars 🤣🤣 I am quite young but still came in as an original film shooter, picking it up as a teen during the late 2000s; sometimes the lomo vibe sharpness allergic peeps are funny.
Delta 400 in XTOL/XT3 FTW, but I have in the fridge (as a 120 shooter) currently the whole lineup with a brick each of D400, HP5 and K400. Thinking that I started up wanting to just use HP5 for everything...
I used HP5 exclusively, for EVERYTHING, for like 10 years. I have some regrets about that. These days I prefer Delta 400, but it's not available in 4x5, which is what I shoot most.
Yeah, the lomo crowd has got their thing down. I respect the "let it go" philosophy. But sometimes I'm amazed at the effort they'll expend to avoid just using a regular camera/film.
@@Gribley For color I am much more "yolo" cost wise because Portra is about the best thing out there, and not much of a way to cut costs. I recently was quite happy with the beautiful detail yet rendering of a portrait I took of my dad, P160 in medium format.
For B&W there is also something nice with the Kentmeres or Foma, much more loose shooting which can lead to getting more of those pictures that grow with time.
Not even lomo but I have a bunch of photo club mates that do really weird things. One prints using screens to contact print 😅
Who complains about the too fine grain... print large ha!
@@wotajared They . . . contact print . . . with . . . screens?
@@Gribley ...I know, I know. Laptopogram it is called. My photographer innards crawl... But I turn the eye and that's how I got some free Portra and K400 😂 it's too sharp and not the best for being used in old box cameras as a source (particularly the backing paper of Ilford is weak and gray vs. Foma)
So far (developing in DD-X) I've noticed that Kentmere produces thin negatives at Ilford's recommended times. Seems like that would line up with what you're seeing here.
From what I can see, the notion that HP5 and K400 have the same developing time is just a pure BS.
Agree with your final thoughts duh...
I really liked the reflection about the post-pandemic film photography. :)
I have 2 doubts:
1. The Kentmere film looks definitely underexposed/underdeveloped, so may be exposing it 1-2 stops more or/and developing it different way will recover the dynamic range a bit more?
2. Is it possible that the "softer" grain and the lack of details on Kentmare is partially because of the scanning, are you sure it was in the sharp focus when scanning?
Agree with number 1 entirely. If I were shooting this film seriously I'd expose at ISO 200 and develop longer. On number 2, I am certainly not immune to such mistakes, but [goes to double check] the edge details of both films (the sprocket holes, edge of the frame) are equally sharp, so that makes me think digitizing was consistent. I scanned them back to back within like five minutes, so while not impossible, I think an error here is unlikely.
OK I sub, you seem legit. :)
The digital "looks better" than film spiel is always amusing to me. As if all photographers are working in laboratories and resolution is the end-all-be-all of the art, and literally no other qualities matter at all. The argument for greater sharpness basically goes out the window anyway as soon as you're hand holding a camera - it's pretty much irrelevant for 99% of photos taken (this also applies to film photography, people have been obsessing over looking at lines on charts or dead on shots of brick walls for decades, but statistically, most photographs tend to be of other subjects).
I agree sharpness isn't the most important metric . . . But we're also talking about 35mm here. Not a lot of image quality there to argue about in the first place.
Film does not have more resolution or whatever raw specs than digital, but it looks dramatically different than digital. Yes, you could theoretically replicate anything digitally. You could AI paint a dinosaur about to eat you into every single photo you shoot as part of your "style" too if you want, at great time and effort and expense and imperfection. But if you like the look of film, just... shooting film is way more efficient than trying to edit every photo you take to look like film in post. So yes, there is a reason to shoot film. Halation, grain, color combinations of color film, etc. (no you cannot just match that with a LUT, because of color metamers -- a white wall in indoor lighting for Harman Phoenix will be acid green, a white van in noon sunlight will be white. Digital will see both as white. You can't lookup table white to two different colors.)
For the actual comparison: You absolutely did something wrong with metering or different days being involved etc, because I shoot K400 at suggested dev times all the time, and it's completely fine at being metered normally at 400, all the details are fine, it does not give whole rolls of crushed nothing like this, or anything like it. You can even eke out 800 without push dev (just underexposing) on some scenes and have all the detail, in a pinch. Not having done rigorous testing, I cannot dispute any of the fine details of the case like acutance, exact curves, shoulders, etc etc, you may be correct about all that (though not shooting them within the same minute with 2 cameras undermines a lot of this, that really is the way to compare films), but "Maybe it's an ISO 100 film" is total nonsense. Something went wrong there.
I even accidentally shot a roll coincidentally AT 100 the other day without realizing it, and it was all a blown-out complete mess, totally ruined, not "wow this is perfect somehow"
Hello! All these frames were indeed shot within minutes of each other, under a cloudless sky, at the same settings, and developed for the recommended times literally in the same tank. Adding a second camera would INCREASE variables. If you're getting different results, great!
@@Gribley Then either 1) you hit an exposure compensation dial or something without realizing it, in between, in that case, or 2) HP5 isn't a 400 speed film, not the other way around. If you look at the technical spec sheets, Kentmere 400 actually says that they followed exact ISO standards and measured it at 400. When you look at HP5's spec sheet, it says they explicitly did NOT follow ISO standards, and just gave you where they think you get "best results in our vague opinion" etc. So that is a possible explanation, that HP5 is maybe actually like 800 and K400 is 400. In which case, following your own past experience with HP5 may have led you to develop for what is actually more like 800 speed, making K400 too dark.
@@gavinjenkins899 Hey Gavin, there is no exposure compensation dial on the FG20. If there were, it wouldn't matter, because I was metering with a digital camera, using the same lens, and transferring the settings manually, as mentioned in the video.
I think it's pretty unlikely that HP5 is actually double its box speed and no one has noticed for 35 years. Plus, that wouldn't explain why the HP5 and the digital images were very consistently exposed. K400 was the outlier.
I specifically say in the video that I DO NOT think K400 is a 100 speed film. I think it's more likely that the published development times are insufficient.
@@Gribley "I think it's pretty unlikely that HP5 is actually double its box speed and no one has noticed for 35 years." And yet it IS likely that another film stock from the exact same company is one FOURTH it's [box speed + development instructions] for 15 years with nobody noticing? Because that's your position, and it's more extreme than my theory is by a factor of two If we assume you made no mistakes in your test, then one way or the other, one of the [box speeds + development instructions] is way off and nobody noticed for decade(s), so "Surely someone would have noticed in decade(s)" is off the table as an option, if you insist you made no mistakes. And I'm not sure why you think development instructions being off by multiple stops is any less extreme or any less negligent than the box speed being off by multiple stops. They would both have exactly the same (sized) total effect on customers, so both those things are equally egregious, it doesn't matter which combination of them it is. (edit: I don't mean they are functionally identical, I mean they are equally large mistakes from Ilford)
@@Gribley Also, Ilford is known for already lying about box speeds in multiple other cases (not that that's uncommon among manufacturers, to be clear). They've openly admitted in the past that Phoenix is actually 125 not 200, and that Delta 3200 is 1000 not 3200. More examples don't seem shocking to me on top of those.
Scientific comparison? Now I know the difference between suicidal thoughts and just plain sudden death