Ilford's Pan F Plus has been a staple black-and-white film for decades, but it was never available in sheet formats until now. The new 4x5 and 8x10 releases open up a genuinely different shooting experience, and it's well worth a look.
Coming to you from Kyle McDougall, this hands-on video takes Ilford Pan F Plus in 4x5 sheet film out for its first real test at Ratcliffe on Soar, a decommissioned coal power plant in England with cooling towers still standing. McDougall had six sheets of pre-production film to work with, so every frame counted. He'd already shot Pan F Plus in 120 format and noted it was punchier than his usual HP5 or FP4, with stronger micro contrast and slightly less shadow detail. The jump to 4x5 is a massive increase in negative size, and that's where things get genuinely interesting.
He develops using Ilford DDX with rotary processing, then digitizes with a Panasonic Lumix S5 II X in high-res mode paired with a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 Macro Art lens, converting the files through Negative Lab Pro. The resulting scans land between 9,000 and 10,000 pixels on the long edge. At 100%, the sharpness is striking and the grain is almost nonexistent. The images shown in the video are mostly straight from conversion with minor exposure and tonal adjustments, and McDougall says he was surprised by how little work they needed.
McDougall also shot one final sheet back home the next morning, pairing it against a sheet of Ilford HP5 Plus of the same scene for a direct comparison. At first glance the two aren't dramatically different, but zooming into areas like roof tiles or a drain pipe tells a different story. Pan F Plus shows more contrast and noticeably less grain. One thing worth knowing: the visible grain in HP5 actually makes it look sharper at a quick glance, even though the Pan F Plus files hold more actual detail. It's a counterintuitive result that says something useful about how we read sharpness visually. McDougall shoots HP5 constantly, and even he found the side-by-side comparison worth a longer look.
Check out the full video above for McDougall's complete frame-by-frame breakdown, the full comparison results, and his final verdict on whether Pan F Plus belongs in your large format bag.
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