Welcome to part seven of my Bergger Pancro 400 review series. In this article I’ll be demonstrating the film in medium format (120) shot at EI 400 and bracketed by a single stop on each side.

If you’re new to the series, I strongly advice you to have a read of the previous articles. You can find them at the Bergger Pancro 400 hub along with a full background on the film in part one.

Here’s what’s covered in this article:

Shooting / development / scanning methodology

Camera

I used my trusty 2000 series Hasselblad (focal plane shutter) with an A12 6×6 format film back. I metered using a Sekonic L-608 set to spot mode and zoomed to 1 degree.

Each scene was metered at three points and an average was taken, which was then compared to the an incident reading from the same meter. Where there was a difference, I went with the lower reading of the two.  Each each frame was bracketed by a single stop of under exposure and over exposure.

Lens

I used my Hasselblad Planar F 80/2.8 at F/2.8 on the indoor scenes and at F/4 outside. No filters were used.

Development

As with the previous parts in this series – and for consistency, – the film was developed at 20c in Rodinal 1+25 for 8 minutes as per Bergger’s datasheet. During development, it was agitated continuously for the first 60 seconds and then again for 10 seconds at the top of every minute thereafter.

Ilford’s Ilfostop and Rapid Fixer were used at the manufacturer’s recommended dilutions and as per Bergger’s datasheet, the film was fixed for an additional minute before being dunked in Kodak Photoflo and then rinsed for five minutes.

You may notice that the samples below are not 6×6…this is down to sheer idiocy on my part, as I only used enough chemistry to develop a single roll of 35mm film. This resulted in approximately 1/3 of each frame being undeveloped and fixed away. I scanned and cropped to 6×4.5 as a result.

Scanning

The film was scanned using an Epson Perfection V750 Pro scanner in factory-shipped 35mm holders.

I scanned to TIFF at 1600dpi in Vuescan and I removed a few flecks of dust in Adobe Lightroom.

The files were exported to 1000px on the longest edge in Lightroom with a light hand on getting the file size down for web.

Samples

I have provided all four 3-frame scenes I shot on this roll below. As with the other parts in this series, the order of images below is underexposed, correctly exposed (per meter) and overexposed.

Click/tap on the image thumbnails to open the full-sized image in a lightbox. Use the navigation icons, swipe the screen, or tap the arrow keys on your keyboard to cycle through each set.

Sample one

Sample two

Sample three

Sample four

~ EM

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2 responses to “Film stock review: Bergger Pancro 400 Part 7 – 120 EI 400 (bracketed +/- 1 stop)”

  1. Steven Liddle Avatar

    Why do you rinse after using photoflo? Isn’t the point of photoflo to ensure that the water flows off the film? Should be the last thing you do before hanging to dry…

    1. I moved it from the final step in my process to the penultimate one after years of doing it the “correct way” – following a relocation, in fact. The adjusted method works for where I am better than the original one and as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

 

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