Konica Pan 400

Konica was the third largest film maker on earth through the 1990s, behind Kodak and Fujifilm, and most of their B&W work has been forgotten in the years since they exited the photo business. Pan 400 was their general-purpose 400-speed silver halide negative, a contemporary of Tri-X and HP5+ that never crossed into press-shooter use the way the Kodak and Ilford competitors did. Konishiroku, the parent firm founded in 1873, ran the Sakura brand until 1987, when they consolidated everything under the Konica name.

The formulation was traditional cubic grain on a triacetate base. Reviews from the era pegged the look as cleaner than Tri-X with less character, closer in feel to Fuji Neopan 400 than to anything from Ilford. It pushed adequately to 800 and could survive 1600 with Microphen, though that is anecdotal: Konica did not promote it as a push stock and most users rated it at box speed. Compared to current Kentmere 400, Pan 400 had finer grain at the cost of a slightly flatter midtone curve.

The brand history is also the discontinuation story. Konica merged with Minolta on 5 August 2003 to form Konica Minolta, and the merged company shut down its photo imaging division in March 2006. Production of the B&W lineup wound down in the years before that closure. Surviving rolls turn up in Japanese photo shops and on online resellers, almost always past their stamped expiration and showing the base fog that twenty-year-old fast film accumulates.

Documented format is 35mm only, in 24 and 36 exposure cassettes. No 120 or sheet sizes appear in any working-photographer reference. Standard B&W chemistry handles it without trouble: D-76 at 1:1 or HC-110 dilution B in any modern darkroom still works fine.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31, the conventional silver halide 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 age-fogged rolls, add another half to one full stop on top of the reciprocity math to account for two decades of base density creep.