120 Film Comparison Chart

If you have spent your photographic life on a digital sensor and you are now moving into 120 medium-format film, the most useful thing anyone can give you is a translation device. The chart below is one. It sets the grain character of each recommended film stock against the megapixel-equivalent resolution that stock produces at each of the four 120 frame sizes - 35mm, 645, 6x6, and 6x7. The numbers are rough, drawn from MTF testing and from working experience scanning negatives at high resolution; treat them as the right neighbourhood, not as gospel.

The films listed here are the ones that are worth shooting today: still in production, available everywhere from a London camera shop to an online specialist, processed by any black-and-white or C-41 lab in the country. There are wonderful stocks not on this list (Acros 100, Cinestill, Adox CMS) - these are the workhorses.

Compiled by Josh Redfearn and reproduced here with his permission as a permanent reference. Josh teaches the chemistry and printing courses at POST in Hove, the artist-led photography studio founded by Simon Roberts and Nina Emett.

Colour negative film is the workhorse stock for portraiture and landscape in most contemporary documentary practice. It tolerates exposure error generously - up to two stops over, one stop under - which makes it forgiving in the field. The three stocks below are Kodak’s flagship line; Fujifilm 400H is no longer in production and is excluded.

Tabular-grain emulsions (Ilford Delta, Kodak T-Max) use flat, plate-shaped silver halide crystals that pack more efficiently than traditional cubic crystals. The result is a noticeably finer grain at any given ISO, and a sharper, cleaner image at the cost of a slightly more clinical look. If you want the maximum resolution from a film stock - particularly at 100 or 400 ISO - this is where it lives.

^* Delta 3200 is nominally a 1000 ISO emulsion; Ilford rates it 3200 because of the way photographers push it under push-processing development. Real-world exposure index varies.

Traditional cubic-grain emulsions are the films most associated with twentieth-century documentary photography. Bigger, more visible silver crystals; a lower headline resolution at the same ISO than a tabular stock; a more characterful, more "film-like" image. HP5 Plus and Tri-X 400 are the classic 400-speed reportage films - the stocks Don McCullin, Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark and a hundred other photojournalists used to define how a black-and-white documentary frame looks. FP4 Plus is the slower, calmer cousin.

The megapixel-equivalent figures are estimates of the resolving power of a clean negative scanned at high resolution on a good drum or DSLR scan. They are not megapixels in the digital-sensor sense - film does not have pixels - but they are a useful translation when you are deciding what frame size to commit to.

Practical implications:

• A 6x6 negative on Ilford Delta 100 produces a file in the same neighbourhood as a top-end medium-format digital sensor. There is no resolution penalty for working in film at this size.
• A 6x7 negative on Kodak Ektar 100 - a slow, ultra-fine-grain colour stock at the largest 120 frame size - produces a file past 100 megapixels of effective resolution. This is the format Eggleston and Stephen Shore worked in for a reason.
• HP5 Plus and Tri-X at 6x6 sit comfortably in the 38-45 MP range. Plenty for a magazine spread, an exhibition print, a book reproduction at any reasonable size.
• Pushed Delta 3200 is the compromise stock - low light, available darkness, the fastest emulsion you can get away with - and the resolution drops accordingly. It is for the frame that would not exist otherwise.

Frame size matters more than film speed. A 35mm Tri-X frame and a 6x7 Tri-X frame are the same emulsion; the difference between ten megapixels and fifty is the negative real estate. If you want resolution from film, the answer is almost always to step up the format rather than to step down the ISO.