Forte Pan 400

Fortepan came out of Vac, Hungary, from a plant that started life in 1922 as a Kodak factory before nationalization in 1948. Forte Photochemical Industry coated black and white roll film and paper there for half a century, mostly serving the Eastern Bloc and later sold internationally under whatever brand needed it. Bergger and Freestyle both rebranded Fortepan 400 in the late nineties and early 2000s, sometimes as J&C Classic 400, sometimes as Classicpan 400, sometimes as Europan 400. All the same Forte coating.

The 400 was the company's high-speed offering, sold cheap with a softer emulsion than HP5 or Tri-X and a curve that nominally hit ISO 400 but in practice landed closer to 200. Photographers learned to rate it down. Develop in D-76 at 1:1, HC-110, or Pyrocat-HD; nine minutes in HC-110 dilution B at 20 C was a common starting point, close to what Tri-X took under its older Kodak time and longer than Tri-X's current 3.75 minute recommendation. The grain ran visibly clumpier than the Ilford or Kodak equivalents, which gave it a vintage character that landscape and large-format shooters appreciated in sheet sizes.

The red sensitivity ran further than most panchromatics, similar in some respects to Kodak Technical Pan, which made it interesting for portrait work where you wanted slightly lighter skin without a yellow filter. The trade-off was a softer base that scratched easily.

Forte filed for bankruptcy in 2004. A brief reopening under Forteinvest in 2005 lost money the next year, and production stopped in January 2007. Any roll you find now is at least nineteen years old. Available formats included 35mm, 120, and sheet sizes through 8x10, all freezer stock only at this point.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31, matching the silver-grain baseline shared with Tri-X and HP5+. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading extends to about 90 seconds at the negative. With aged Forte the better practice is to overexpose a stop on top of that, because the base fog from two decades of storage will eat shadow detail.