Silberra Pan 100

Silberra Pan 100 sits in the same family as their Pan 50, cut and packaged in Saint Petersburg from Agfa-Gevaert master rolls originally engineered for aerial and industrial surveillance. The emulsion has been adjusted away from the original surveillance contrast curve toward something a pictorial photographer can actually print, but the underlying resolution stays high: Silberra publishes 240 line-pairs per millimeter at 1000:1 test contrast. That is well above Ilford FP4+ or Kodak T-MAX 100, though resolution numbers from different makers are rarely measured in identical conditions.

The rated speed range is 80 to 160, and at box speed it lands clean. Two oddities are worth knowing. The emulsion carries unusually high sensitivity in the red and near-infrared end of the spectrum, which means tungsten and incandescent indoor lighting render warmer subjects much brighter than a normal panchromatic film would suggest. Treat artificial-light scenes as a test rather than a known quantity. The second is the polyester base at 0.1 mm: flatter than triacetate in negative carriers, more resistant to damage, slightly more prone to edge fogging if you load in bright light.

Filters track standard panchromatic behavior, with the IR-leaning sensitivity making yellows and oranges a touch more aggressive than they would be on FP4+. Yellow runs about a 1.5x exposure multiplier, dark orange 1.8x, red 3x to 4x. For developers, Silberra lists their own S-76 alongside Kodak D-76, Rodinal, and PyrocatHD. Rodinal at 1:50 gives the high-acutance grain that suits architecture and landscape; D-76 at 1:1 cleans it up for portrait work.

Sold in 35mm only, 36-exposure cassettes. No 120 or sheet sizes at present.

The reciprocity exponent is 1.31, identical to Tri-X and HP5+. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A 30-second meter reading becomes roughly 90 seconds at the negative, which comes up often if you are shooting interiors or twilight at small apertures.