Konica Pan 100

Konica Pan 100 is one of those Japanese B&W stocks that has slipped almost entirely out of public memory. It was a conventional cubic-grain panchromatic emulsion sold in 35mm and 120 by Konica before the company merged with Minolta in 2003 and exited photo imaging in 2006. Beyond that broad timeline, documentation is thin. The Konica data sheets are not online in complete form, and surviving accounts are mostly forum threads and a handful of EMULSIVE posts shot on freezer stock.

What working photographers report tracks with a mid-tier Japanese pan film of that era. The grain is fine but not delta-fine, the curve is straight enough to behave under most metering approaches, and the look sits somewhere between Fomapan 100 and Ilford FP4 Plus. Less character than Foma, more neutral than FP4. Put a 120 frame next to a Plus-X negative from the same year and you would have a hard time picking which was which.

Developer choices in surviving dev-chart entries are the ones you would guess: D-76 stock or 1:1, ID-11 at similar times, Rodinal 1:50 for sharper grain. Reported D-76 times sit around six minutes at 20 degrees Celsius, which lines up with Ilford Pan 100 and has led some users to suspect Konica was rebranding a Harman master roll in the final years. That last claim is a forum-floor rumor, not confirmed, and worth saying so.

Use it at box speed. Rate it at 80 if you want a touch more shadow latitude. The film is not aggressive enough to dictate a style, which is part of why it never built the cult following Foma or Tri-X did. It just works.

No fresh stock. What you find is freezer rolls and the occasional brick on Japanese auction sites.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31, the standard silver-grain baseline. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second metered exposure becomes roughly 90 seconds at the negative, which matches Tri-X and HP5 closely enough that you can use one meter calculation for all three.