Silberra Pan 200

Silberra started as a chemistry house in St. Petersburg before it sold a roll of film. The company funded its move into emulsion through an Indiegogo campaign in October 2017, then released a panchromatic line based on modified Agfa surveillance stock. PAN200 sits in the middle of that line. Same Agfa Aviphot lineage as a handful of other rebadged stocks, but Silberra retuned the contrast curve and widened the dynamic range to make a film that behaves usefully outside an aerial survey camera.

The data sheet quotes 200 line-pairs per millimeter at 1000:1 TOC contrast, which puts it in the same resolving class as FP4 Plus. Grain is fine and tight. The base is a clear 0.1 mm polyester with an anti-curling layer that keeps negatives flat through scanning, which matters more than people credit until they wrestle a curling strip into a holder.

Daylight is where this film does its best work. Aviphot-derived emulsions retain extended sensitivity into the near-infrared, so summer foliage skews lighter than you would expect from a conventional ISO 200 stock. Skies darken cleanly without a yellow filter. Tungsten indoors is the weak point: results go muddy and lose the snap that defines outdoor frames.

Official exposure range is 125 to 320, with 200 as box speed. Below 125 the contrast falls apart. Push past 320 and the grain roughens. Rodinal at 1:50 gives sharp, well-defined grain. D-76 or Xtol smooth it. The Silberra house developers exist for the loyal but are not required.

Available in 35mm. The 120 has been sporadic. No sheet film. Watch the import situation if you are buying from outside Russia; supply has been uneven since 2022.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.31. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 30-second exposure becomes about 90 seconds at the negative, and a two-minute reading stretches to roughly seven minutes. For interior architecture at small apertures, the math comes up quickly.