Fuji Neopan 100 Acros II

created/modified 2020-05-24

Fuji Neopan 100 Acros II B&W Film Profile/Review

This tech page is for Fuji Film Neopan 100 Acros II, or ACROS_100II. This is a medium speed B&W film that comes in 35mm roll, and 120 roll. Fuji Film stopped production of the original Neopan 100 Acros, then by popular demand re-introduced it back into the marketplace as Neopan 100 Acros II. Neopan 100 Acros II is a medium speed, ultra-high-image quality black-and-white negative film and features the world’s highest standard in grain quality among ISO 100 films.

Sample Images

You can also check out my Flickr gallery of image shot on this film here. It will be updated with new images as I have them.

Development

There are many ways to develop ACROS_100II. Following Fuji’s recommended development in the their tech sheet for the film is a good place to start if you want to develop this film yourself. If you send your film in to us here at Simple Film Lab, we develop ACROS_100II with Replenished Kodak XTOL with constant rotary agitation as standard practice. The standard development time is 7:30 at 75 degrees Fahrenheit for standard ISO contrast of 0.615, per the ISO standard for black and white film. We use a standard 1+4 white distilled vinegar/water stop bath and fix the film in Ilford Rapid Fixer.

Exposure Guidance

There are many ways to meter and expose ACROS_100II. If sending this film in to Simple Film Lab to process and scan for you, we recommend using an exposure index of 80 instead of the box speed of 100, and taking an incident light reading of the darkest part of the scene you want to retain details in and subtracting 2 stops of exposure from that reading. For example, if the darkest part of the scene that you want to retain detail in reads 1/125 shutter, f/4.0 at ISO 80, either set the shutter to 1/500 or close down the aperture to f/8.0, or a combination of the two to reduce the exposure by two stops. If you don’t have a light meter, then set your camera exposure compensation to +1 stop, and that will generally result in an acceptable exposure for most situations once scanned in and density corrected.

Characteristic Curve

Using the development described above, here’s the characteristic curve for Neopan 100 Acros II, if developed as described above.

The scale along the left is film density in LOG units, the scale along the bottom is exposure in lux-seconds. The yellow line is the film curve. Each dot on the line is a full stop of exposure.

Dynamic Range/Exposure Latitude

ACROS_100II has a good amount of dynamic range. Exposing the film at EI 80 results in approximately 4 stops of exposure from middle grey to 0.1 density above film base plus fog with another stop of very low contrast exposure before film base plus fog happens. This is excellent black performance. The stop of exposure above above the 0.1 density mark is a little lower contrast than the rest of the curve, so if printing this film in a dark room, it might be beneficial to give a bit more exposure than EI 80 to pull any important blacks a little higher up on the curve, however, for scanning, this is fine and results in excellent blacks when viewing our DNG scans in Adobe Lightroom.

Going the other direction, from middle grey up into the highlights, the contrast kicks up just a bit. We exposed and charted up to 5 stops over middle grey and still did not see the film start to shoulder off, so this film can handle a reasonable amount of over exposure, though with a density of approximately 2.0 log units over film base plus fog, this is roughly a grade 2 print for a normal contrast scene that is exposed at EI 80.

Resolution/Grain

ACROS_100II has very fine grain for a 100 speed film. According to Fuji’s spec sheet for the film, it has an RMS granularity value of 7, and resolves 200 lines/mm at 1000:1 contrast. This falls to 60 lines/mm at 1.6:1 contrast. This is excellent performance and is right up there with Kodak’s TMAX 100 film.

Sample DNG Files

As part of this tech sheet/film review I’m making a ZIP file available that contains some Adobe DNG files that are a sample of what you would receive if you sent your film into Simple Film Lab to process and scan. It’s relatively large, but if you want to see you can get, worth a look.

Click Here to download the sample ZIP file.