>While looking at some pairs I took at dusk I was wondering about
>higher speed films. Adorama has Kodak Ektachrome E200 in 120 size and
>was wondering if any of you have used it?

Yup, I tried a few rolls and got grain the size of golf balls. (I do enjoy the warm tonality of
Kodak's E100GX and this is now my preferred film for shooting cities at night.) Kodak
humorously claims that E200 can be pushed to ISO800, which gets the grain up to
baseball size. Provia 100F works very well pushed a stop, and this is what I usually use
with my Sputnik. On a sunny day this lets me set the camera tof22 and the shutter speed
at 1/100. I've found that Provia 100F pushed two stops looks better than E200 pushed
one stop.

My Australian friends have been taunting me with tales of Provia 400X, a new fast film with
incredibly small grain. (When is this stuff going to be available in North America??!!) I
can't wait to put a roll of it in a TL120 and try some 1/250 and 1/500 exposures at f22.
In my opinion this represents a far greater advance in imaging capabilities than the
doubling and tripling of megapixel counts in digital cameras these past few years.

Jim Harp

--- In MF3D-group@yahoogroups.com, "jamesbharp" wrote:

> My Australian friends have been taunting me with tales of Provia

400X, a new fast film with incredibly small grain.

Interesting! I have a couple applications where MF might work great,
but have been holding off because my experience with high magnification
(low viewing ratio) viewers (like Don Lopp's one-of-a-kind beauty) is
that even Provia F and Velvia 50 suffer annoying granulation rivalry in
solid color areas like blue sky, gray un-detailed cliffs, etc.

> In my opinion this represents a far greater advance in imaging

capabilities than the doubling and tripling of megapixel counts in
digital cameras these past few years.

Hmmm? Because of the above? It is true the granulation rivalry is
largely absent from low ISO (relatively noiseless) digital images, or
can be reduced or eliminated by postprocessing digital frames or
scanned film. Noise reduction in digital systems seems to me to be as
great an advance as MPix expansion.

John