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03-24-2017, 03:49 PM - 1 Like   #1
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First Film Camera, Purchased Pentax P30, Need Advice on What Film to Use

This is my first film camera and I have no idea what type of film to purchase for my Pentax P30.
It uses DX coded film but I can't seem to find out what is good.
Any help would be much appreciated.

03-24-2017, 04:15 PM   #2
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Welcome! When starting out, any colour film will do! Buy a couple of rolls of budget stuff, find the cheapest place to have it developed, go out and have fun learning! (Just be aware that unlike digital, the learning can be expensive - so take your time over each shot.)

When you've got a couple of rolls under your belt and made your first dozen or so hideous blunders (because all of a sudden you don't have shake reduction any more and the metering is not quite as advanced as a modern DSLR and you can't instantaneously review your results), and you've had time to sit down with the pics you got back and kick yourself for your mistakes and not repeat them on the next roll... then and only then go out shopping for the good stuff, because the good stuff is VERY expensive on a per-shot basis.
03-24-2017, 04:28 PM   #3
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I was typing something similar to what pathdoc said, then refreshed and saw the post

One more thing I'd add: aside from color or not, choosing ISO is probably the biggest decision you need to make. If you're used to digital, changing ISO is probably second nature and that's one more thing you can't do Since you're just starting, my suggestion is to get ISO 400 film. 400 film is cheaper and you get many more options compared to ISO 800 color film. ISO 100 film is a bit limiting, even an overcast day is sometimes problematic, let alone indoors. From there get a few rolls and experiment.
03-24-2017, 04:44 PM   #4
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QuoteOriginally posted by pathdoc Quote
Welcome! When starting out, any colour film will do! Buy a couple of rolls of budget stuff, find the cheapest place to have it developed, go out and have fun learning! (Just be aware that unlike digital, the learning can be expensive - so take your time over each shot.)

When you've got a couple of rolls under your belt and made your first dozen or so hideous blunders (because all of a sudden you don't have shake reduction any more and the metering is not quite as advanced as a modern DSLR and you can't instantaneously review your results), and you've had time to sit down with the pics you got back and kick yourself for your mistakes and not repeat them on the next roll... then and only then go out shopping for the good stuff, because the good stuff is VERY expensive on a per-shot basis.
QuoteOriginally posted by aaacb Quote
I was typing something similar to what pathdoc said, then refreshed and saw the post

One more thing I'd add: aside from color or not, choosing ISO is probably the biggest decision you need to make. If you're used to digital, changing ISO is probably second nature and that's one more thing you can't do Since you're just starting, my suggestion is to get ISO 400 film. 400 film is cheaper and you get many more options compared to ISO 800 color film. ISO 100 film is a bit limiting, even an overcast day is sometimes problematic, let alone indoors. From there get a few rolls and experiment.
Thank you both for the quick reply and advice! I plan to learn as much as I can with the camera, even bought a slightly better lens for it too. Learning from mistakes is always quite good and sometimes can have their own unique yet impressive results
I have had a look and found some cheap Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400. However there is two varieties; 24 Exposure Film and 36 Exposure Film.
What is the difference between the two exposures?

03-24-2017, 04:52 PM   #5
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Good point, that - I had completely forgotten to mention the changing ISO thing, or maybe I hadn't forgotten... because of course the P30 is one of those cameras on which you CAN'T change it!

But yes, there is a reason why 400-speed film is the most common one remaining on the shelves these days - it's by far the most versatile (though on very sunny days outdoors it can cause composition problems by demanding tight apertures and high shutter speeds...).
03-24-2017, 07:16 PM   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by Lazmarr Quote
Thank you both for the quick reply and advice! I plan to learn as much as I can with the camera, even bought a slightly better lens for it too. Learning from mistakes is always quite good and sometimes can have their own unique yet impressive results
I have had a look and found some cheap Fujifilm Superia X-TRA 400. However there is two varieties; 24 Exposure Film and 36 Exposure Film.
What is the difference between the two exposures?
The difference between 24 exposure and 36 exposure is you get 12 more frames in the 36 exposure roll. Labs will charge you the same to process/develop a roll. So cost-wise, it's cheaper to get 36 exposure rolls. The downside is snapping 12 more frames before you can run off to the lab to see how they turned out!

If you're coming from digital, ask your lab if they can process, scan, and upload to a cloud service. Scanning digitizes the film into JPG or TIFF files. A lab will either burn them to a CD or upload to Dropbox or similar or email them to you. It's much more convenient to get them from a cloud service or email. I made the mistake of getting my first roll as 4 X 6 prints instead of scans. After that, I realized I was going to quickly fill up a drawer full of crap photos. Now I get scans and only get prints of the keepers.

Oh, and another budget film is Agfa Vista 400. Here's a review.
03-24-2017, 07:33 PM   #7
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Black and white is a good way to get started, and you can develop your own films.

Recommended film: Tri-X 400.

Good price here too:
http://www.ultrafineonline.com/ulxtblwhfi.html


Last edited by Pepe Guitarra; 03-24-2017 at 07:41 PM.
03-24-2017, 08:18 PM   #8
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If in a pinch for funds, other than Ultrafine Xtreme, there's also Arista EDU Ultra (aka Fomapan rebranded, but a little cheaper than Foma), as well as Kentmere 100 and 400 (made by the same company that makes Ilford films, it's not ilford film, but rather an entirely new emulsion they created that was more economical to produce, and as a result cheaper to purchase). The Arista EDU Ultra 200 is my favorite of the cheapies as it has a more vintage/retro look compared to the 100/400 variants.

The downside though is last time I checked, not all the cheaper films have DX coding on them, so double check first. (and because I bulk load, I would need those DX stickers to use on a P30, or just stick to the defaulted ISO 100 the camera picks without DX coding)

Tri-X 400 is probably my favorite, but I don't really use it much as it has gone up in cost, they also raised the price of bulk rolls to where they're much more expensive than just buying 18 rolls of 36 exposures (roughly how many rolls in a single 100 foot roll).

Another past favorite, but a bit pricey is Fuji Neopan Arcos 100.
03-25-2017, 03:55 AM   #9
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Hey wait a minute, guys and girls - let's not be racing too far ahead just yet - OP hasn't even got their feet wet with the first roll of film and you're already talking about high-end B&W film for home development!

Sure, that's where I eventually ended up, but that was after many rolls of colour film and a lot of experience and confidence gained.
03-25-2017, 05:18 AM   #10
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QuoteOriginally posted by Lazmarr Quote
However there is two varieties; 24 Exposure Film and 36 Exposure Film. What is the difference between the two exposures?
As murrelet said, the only difference is the number of images you can take. The 36 exposure film will be cheaper per image but it also has disadvantages.
For instance if you experiment with some settings you have to wait for 12 more pictures before you can process the film yourself or send it to a lab. It doesn't sound like a big problem, but when using film I tend to be substantially more selective in what I photograph. It is not unusual for me that a 24 exposure film lasts up to 6 month in the camera before I used all frames and without any exif-data you might have a hard time remembering what you where experimenting with if you don't took notes during shooting.
03-25-2017, 05:35 AM   #11
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QuoteOriginally posted by othar Quote
It doesn't sound like a big problem, but when using film I tend to be substantially more selective in what I photograph. It is not unusual for me that a 24 exposure film lasts up to 6 month in the camera before I used all frames and without any exif-data you might have a hard time remembering what you where experimenting with if you don't took notes during shooting.
Oh yes. I don't have any problem going quickly through a roll if there's something to photograph (my kids playing with their friends in the local park, for example), but right now when it's minus 20C outside and snowing and nobody's playing anywhere and I don't want to risk a film body outside, it can be hard to get through a roll.
03-25-2017, 06:50 PM - 1 Like   #12
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Geez, Pathdoc, where do you live, Northern Canada? Fairbanks, Alaska? Oslo, Norway? Please consider blowing some of your -20C weather down in my general direction. We're already running A/C down here in West Cairo -- aka Houston, Texas.

After reading murrelet's very modern way of dealing with the results of his exposed film, and kb244's treatise on current B&W emulsions, I thought I'd add just a bit that Lazmarr may find useful, being brand new to film and all.

Lazmarr, gone are the days of being able to drop your film off at Wal-Mart or Walgreens or CVS and expect such basics as having your negatives returned to you -- and none of these places offer in-house processing anymore. No, you have to find a Pro Lab for that sort of thing now, and you'll be paying Pro Lab prices for the service too. Places like Walgreens will still take your film in for developing, but they send it off, and it takes about a week before you get it back. But instead of negatives, you'll get a CD with scans of your photos. Last time I checked, the scans on the CDs were only about 5 megapixel scans, which is gonna limit your print size to about 4x6 -- maybe 8x10 if you don't look too close.

But as murrelet mentioned, when you're first starting out, you probably shouldn't be too worried about prints anyway. Now, if it just so happens that one of your first photos is brilliant, well too bad for you because the labs places like Walgreens use don't return the negatives. No, if you want to use a lab that might be more economical than a Pro Lab that returns negs, you're looking at using a mail-order service, like Dwayne's -- there are lots of others, but Dwayne's is the only one I'm familiar with and is probably the best known. Dwayne's will also do whatever you want, including making prints, but they'll also return your negatives.

Now, just a brief word about all those B&W films that kb244 mentioned -- in case you might be wondering where to find them, go to freestylephoto.biz for all your film needs, whether color or B&W:

Home | Freestyle Photographic Supplies

Oh, and one final comment about the film you chose. After a hiatus of not shooting any film for several years, when I started getting back into shooting film again back in 2009, I discovered a vastly changed landscape and, on impulse, bought a few rolls of Fuji Superia 400. I'll be honest. I hated the stuff. I thought it was too grainy -- mushy even -- with uninspired colors. But then I'd been used to shooting with very saturated, very sharp, slow slide film emulsions, so perhaps that was some of it. It wasn't until I'd been using the stuff for a while and began to remember some of the tricks with respect to negative film emulsions that one uses to bring out colors and reduce the apparent size of grain that things finally began to improve. Unfortunately, your P30 supports DX coding only, from what I understand. I just scanned a page on the Internet about it -- it seems to be a very basic camera with a Program mode. And it doesn't seem to have Exposure Compensation. But it does have metered manual, so you can still perform the same thing that EC does, albeit manually. When shooting with your camera, try deliberately overexposing by from 1/3 to 2/3 stops, and keep track of which you're doing. But whatever you do, don't underexpose your film. See, the important thing to remember about negative film is it hates to be underexposed. Things just go *bluh*. Some emulsions don't even look very good at box speed. But dial in 1/3 to 2/3 stop of overexposure, and suddenly you've transformed your film from dull to full of life and color and dynamism. Negative film can handle overexposure much better than underexposure, and often it can handle an incredible amount of overexposure. So anyway, give a bit of overexposure a try, see if I'm not right.
03-25-2017, 11:49 PM - 1 Like   #13
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QuoteOriginally posted by pathdoc Quote
Hey wait a minute, guys and girls - let's not be racing too far ahead just yet - OP hasn't even got their feet wet with the first roll of film and you're already talking about high-end B&W film for home development!

Sure, that's where I eventually ended up, but that was after many rolls of colour film and a lot of experience and confidence gained.
?High end? We haven't even talked about orthochromatic, lithography, or infrared film yet...

The main ones I even mentioned were what students would use, you know the pretty vanilla ones in terms of development that any pro lab should be able to handle. Though in the long run, home dev B&W (which is easier than it sounds) is much more economical than C-41/E-6 now days and has much more latitude to mistakes depending on the film.

PS: In regards to the Arista EDU Ultra line, while freestyle is the store behind behind it, B&H Also sells it for the same price that Freestyle sells it, in case there are other items you want from B&H (The shipping is cheaper at B&H too).

There may be some easier to find things at freestyle though, if you plan to take up at home development, which doesn't necessarily need a darkroom if you're scanning in the end, just either a blacked out closet for loading reels for development in daylight tanks, if not that, then a dark bag. It's printing/enlarging where you need access to a "dark room", which could just be a bath tub with some trays and a safe light int he ceiling. (The scanning route can be easily done for 100 or less).

I mainly just have the luxury of a darkroom at the college, which is the primary reason I bother with the paper, though it is easier to get an image out of scanning especially when it was over or under exposed (too dense, too thin, etc).

One word on (negative) film exposure, it's sort of the opposite of digital. You can recover from overexposure within reason, you cannot recover from underexposure as there will be no "image" on the negative if not enough light hit it. Some films can be printable if not scanable from even 2 stops overexposed since it'll be a denser negative, so there will be an image, but if it's too dense it'll just be black, but better than clear which you can't pull an image out of. (digital can recover from some underexposure, but once you clip your highlights, it's gone).

Last edited by kb244; 03-26-2017 at 01:42 AM.
03-26-2017, 04:16 AM   #14
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@kb244 - you said it yourself; you have the LUXURY of access to darkroom facilities.

Once more: we are talking to someone who is JUST starting to dip their toes in the waters of film; PLEASE bear that in mind and try not to overwhelm them at once with details of how they ought to be doing their home developing and printing!!!
03-26-2017, 03:30 PM   #15
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Some time ago also got my hands on my first film camera, also a p30, went with Ilford hp5 400 easier for me to get, pics were fine, very happy with it, second time tried agfa 200, also happy with it, at the moment in one camera fuji colour 400, in the other hp5 400.... Imo get the cheapest, get plenty and have fun
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