Mixed feelings about T400CN

Today I picked up four rolls of T400CN, one of Kodak's "chromogenic" black and white films. This is, to put it simply, a film processed in color chemistry, rather than traditional black and white chemistry, that nevertheless produces a black and white negative.

I feel like a bit of a traitor to my old favorite, Tri-X, which is a beautiful film with a long history. Over the weekend, however, I read a few essays and discussions that suggest that it might be the perfect black and white film for scanning. Put that way, it seemed reasonable to try it. Hopefully it won't hurt my camera's feelings.

My interpretation of the reasoning goes like this: Tri-X is a beautiful film designed in the context of a specific system. It's exposed, processed in chemicals, printed using an enlarger onto silver-coated paper, which is developed chemically in a wet process. The image on the film and the paper are both composed of silver halides converted to metallic silver in the development process.

Is it not possible, then, that since I'm scanning the negs, instead of putting them in an enlarger, and printing with an inkjet system, instead of onto traditional photo paper, that using a non-traditional film might be a better match?

(That's a rhetorical question, by the way, I'm about to answer it here)

The arguments for T400CN as a better choice for a digital process include the following:

It has fine "grain", high detail, and high speed. (Technically this film doesn't have any grain, because the image is formed with dye clouds instead of actual clumps of silver; nevertheless, it's a useful term for the apparent noise in the image.) This is the holy grail of film/developer combinations in traditional black and white film. Newsgroup archives are full of questions and arguments about which film/developer combination will allow people to shoot 35mm film at ASA400 and end up with prints that look like they came out of a large-format camera. The inherent problem, however, is that silver halide has certain limitations based not on hearsay but on that old sourpuss, physics. Faster film response time = larger grain; 35mm = limited amount of surface area = limited amount of total data that can be captured. T400CN reportedly can be exposed anywhere between 200 and 800 ASA with good results, and has the apparent "grain" of ASA100 film -- all possible because the final image is formed with dye clouds instead of silver.

Another argument for using a chromogenic black and white film is that it allows the scanner to take advantage of Applied Science Fiction's very cool Digital ICE technology. Digital ICE is a hardware technology that uses infrared information about the surface of the film to automatically remove dust and scratches from the scan. I was originally skeptical about this technology, but it really does work stunningly well. The only downside: it doesn't work with traditional black and white films. Freaks out.

Now, even though I'm a careful guy, and handle my negs delicately, and hit them with a blower before scanning, I always have to spend a few minutes spotting my black and white images in Photoshop. I don't have to do that with my color images, because I can use ICE on them. And this saves a lot of time over the course of a project.

On the con side, it sounds like chromogenic films don't have quite the same exposure latitude as traditional black and white -- that is, it isn't able to capture as much detail into the shadows and highlights. We'll see if I notice.

A more important issue is longevity. Traditional black and white film has an extremely long life span with no image fading, because the image is composed of metallic silver. Color film, on the other hand, has an inherently limited life span because the image is composed of dye, which is unstable and fades over time. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Largely I expect my negs to be exposed to light for a couple of hours of their total life -- several minutes at the lab, a few minutes while I make my initial scans, and then again if I ever need to scan additional images.

Another issue is aesthetic: I actually like the grain of Tri-X. Will I like street work done without that grain? Will I miss it? The answer here, of course, is that I can still shoot Tri-X on the street. That is, I can as long as they make it -- and if I'm switching away from Tri-X for most of my usage, then I'm helping to contribute to its inevitable removal from the Kodak product line.

I'll report back after I've tried a few rolls, in different lights and different situations.