My local Pound store has started selling the Geek 10 exposure colour film for £2 a roll.
Though it is only £2, the 10 exposures, then paying for development means it doesn’t actually end up being very economical as Kosmofoto points out. But what if you could develop it as a black and white film? Would that make it a cheap film to test cameras? At the very least, it would make a good experiment.
So, a little more about the film, in case you want to use it as a regular colour film. The ten exposures is literally that. I managed to get 9 out of mine once I had loaded it. To get ten you would have to be very careful while loading, or load in the dark. The cassette feels very cheap, a plastic affair that is tricky to open in order to process the film. I had to rip mine apart. The naff cassette also seemed to hinder the movement of the film through the camera and initially thought I had misloaded it. I found using a film picker impossible, hence the ripping apart option. The actual film inside is rebranded Fujifilm C200, here is another great blog with details about that.
I did some research about cross processing colour film as black and white and there are a few articles online. On the whole I didn’t find anything really substantial about using the developing chemicals I had. I have recently been using Kodak D-76 after switching from ilfosol 3. I did find one chat thread that way down said try a development time of 8 minutes at 20 degrees. But most things I read said don’t do it or it was a waste of time.
So ignoring all the naysayers I went for these development details.
Chemicals used: Kodak d-76 at full strength 1:0
Temperature: 21 degrees
Development Time: 8 minutes (with stop=30 secs, fixer=5 minutes)
Of course the emulsion is on a very orangy base that will affect scanning, but was there an actual image to scan after developing? YES!
The film was quite dark due to the plastic film base, but it scanned quite well considering. The initial scans were quite flat, but I processed all 9 exposures through the Snapseed phone app. To be fair, recently the weather has been rainy and dark so even a “real” film would have struggled.
Some of the shots came out quite well, others were underexposed. Overall, they weren’t so bad. What if I took the film out on a bright day and overexposed the film? The next test? Once the weather changes I will try that and update the post. Either way it was not a complete loss, at £2 a roll it is another option.
For camera testing purposes why not buy a £3 36exp roll, the use a dark bag to cut it down into old canisters.
That way it works out at £1/roll though admittedly depending on the camera you might only get 9 shots by the time you’ve loaded a film
I have a couple of duff rolls you could practice on first to see if you can get the lengths correct working in a dark bag.
Or just take nine shots, cut the film in the camera, put the exposed bit straight into the developing tank. No need to respool. That’s what I usually do.
That simple! 😁 On the subject of cutting costs I read somewhere that one of the caffenol recipes is quite effective for b&w developing if colour film.might be ok when just testing save your developer a bit.
I haven’t used caffenol, but it pops up all the time. I think I might try it one day.