In the past 3 or 4 months I have recently been taking a B&W photo class at my highschool. Beforehand I have been very interested in photography in general so my eye has developed quickly and I have been printing, printing, printing! I am in no way looking to step up to the FB papers yet, but maybe some of you afficionados can enlighten me on what else is out there, other than the kodak Polycontrast III RC i've been using. First of all, the packs i have been buying are not VC, so that is a definitive negative. What is the difference between Polycontrast and the Polymax by kodak? The latter is VC i believe. Does ilford, arista, agfa have a better, richer paper? Mainly i have used semi-matte, with an occasionally glossy print for deep blacks. I have searched kodak's website, but they are somewhat amibigious describing the differences between the two papers. Any info is greatly appreciated.

-- Jeff Borenstein (jsb@borg.com), December 20, 1999

Answers

I have been very pleased with Agfa MCP-310. It is a variable contract RC paper with about the best deep blacks I have seen. I also use Edwal Ultra Black as my developer.

-- Sam (sselkind@home.com), December 21, 1999.

Since when is Polycontrast paper not variable contrast? It was teh original variable contrast paper.

As to the other papers, they is obviously a market for each companies products, so there are people who like them. Depending on the paper the blacks may range from cold to warm tones with various subtle casts to them.

The best advice is to print for a year (or at a least a good long while) on a single paper. Then when you get to the point where you can identify some characteristics that you don't like, you are at the point where you can try other papers and see what they each do for you.

-- Terry Carraway (TCarraway@compuserve.com), December 22, 1999.

According to Kodak, Polymax is better suited to Tmax films (also, presumably Ilford Delta) and Polycontrast is better suited to Tri-X, Plus-X etc.(Ilford HP-5, FP-4). Both are variable contrast. Tmax films have less of a shoulder in their characteristic curve, meaning more highlight contrast so Polymax probably has less highlight contrast so the light parts of the print don't go totally white so quickly. I tried both papers briefly when I got back in the darkroom a few years ago. Whatever difference was too subtle to see in my brief test. I settled on Agfa Multicontrast Premium for it's dazzling whites and abundent contrast.

-- Tim Brown (brownt@ase.com), December 22, 1999.

From my experience, the Polymax has a brighter (whiter) stock. This would seem to be an advantage, but after some work with the Polymax, I was looking for a store that still carried the Polycontrast. It just printed my negatives more beautifully. And that was with T-Max negatives. . .

-- Andrew Patteson (inkandsilver@hotmail.com), March 28, 2000.