Adox · ISO 400 B&W negative
Adox Pan 400
Adox produced a single test coating of Pan 400 in September 2010, manufactured on Agfa's former production line in Leverkusen by engineers who had previously coated the original APX 400. The emulsion was a slightly revised version of that older Agfa formula. The plan was to relaunch a proper 400-speed silver-rich classic for the Adox lineup, slotted alongside CHS 100 II at the slower end.
That plan never reached scale. Plans called for series production at Fotokemika in Samobor alongside the CHS 100 line, but when Fotokemika announced its shutdown in August 2012 because the cost of repairing the original coating machinery proved prohibitive, the Pan 400 project went with it. Adox reallocated resources to getting CHS 100 II coated on modern cascade equipment elsewhere. Pan 400 stayed at one experimental run.
The rolls that exist behave like an Agfa APX 400 with slightly cleaner highlight separation, which is to say a traditional cubic-grain 400-speed B&W in the same family as the 1990s APX 400 that built the German press-shooter look. Grain is more pronounced than HP5+ on the same scene, but the curve is closer to a straight line than HP5+'s gentle S, which made it pleasant to print on graded paper. Compared with Tri-X the response is colder and less forgiving of underexposure. Rated at 320 in Rodinal 1:50, it holds shadow detail well enough.
No medium-format version was ever coated. Existing stock is 35mm only, sold through Fotoimpex's German channels until inventory ran out around 2013. Any roll you find now is freezer-stock, well past its sell-by, and the keeping characteristics of that single 2010 emulsion run are not well documented.
The reciprocity exponent is 1.31, the conventional silver-grain baseline shared with Tri-X and HP5+. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading becomes about 90 seconds at the negative. For long-exposure work the math is identical to the films most users will already know, which makes Pan 400 easy to bracket against if you do find a fresh-stored roll.
How the app handles this stock
- Box speed: ISO 400. Picker exposes pull/push chips so you can shoot it at any speed you want and the meter follows.
- Reciprocity: Above one second the app raises metered time to the power of 1.31.
- Expired film: if you load an old roll, set the expiry year and storage in the app and the ISO scales for you. B&W negative decay rates are baked in.