Bulk film lifetime

I had my first experience with a darkroom today! Yipeee!

My college has a darkroom for student use, which has been disused for a number of years. A friend of mine has been a major player in getting it up and running again and he agreed to show me the ropes. I had a great time and was able to produce some pretty good B&W prints from colour negs which was pretty cool to do.

Anyway, in his refurbishing of the room my mate came across a number of things. Some old developer and paper, some of which still seems to be ok and some doesn't, but enough works to get noobs like me started. He also found some film.

The film is 30m bulk rolls of Ilford PanF, HP5 and FP4, still sealed in their original tins. Now, as far as we can establish this film was discontinued in favour of the newer "plus" versions in 1990, making it at least 17 years old. Any ideas if it's likely to work? My Dad has a bulk loader and some cassettes somewhere so I'm inclined to try it just to see. Any tips for using/developing film this far past its sell by date?

It'll almost certainly still work, unless it's been subjected to very high temperatures, but the question is how well.

I should do some testing with some shortish strips at different developing times, and see what works best.

G

There used to be a huge market in out of date film. Sometimes it can last for a surprisingly long time.

Paper is more suspect, but it's only a couple of years ago that I was given some 1950s Agfa paper. Some of it made some good prints, most of it was badly fogged.

You can add defogging agents to developers, but just offhand I can't bring to mind an example. Try an old book on darkroom chemistry - I'll have a look later to see if I can find something in my library.

I would say that the PanF probably is almost as good as new, and the FP4 and HP5 not much worse. In November I developed a batch of films that had been forgotten in various boxes in my storage room for 12 - 25 years. The TriX, FP4, HP5, and Agfapan100 were all OK. Some of the rolls were slightly fogged, put not to the extent that they were even hard to print. Films that didn't fare as well were Agfapan400, and all T-grain films. The result of those were ranging from "very hard to print" to "almost unprintable", with one or two "Print this? You got to be kidding!"

Generally speaking from my experience; traditional grain ages better than T-grain. Slow film ages better than fast film. If you have a bulk roll; make a test developing.

I have on my desk an unopened roll of HP5, expiration date OCT 1982.
One of these days I will take it out for a spin. I will post you the result.

-- MW