Gotcha. I knew you'd look.... ;-)(posted 8323 days ago)Actually, in the circumstances I'm about to describe, it does; that surprised me.
For quite a while when I was shooting in marginal light with 35mm I'd wondered if I'd be better off with faster film in a larger format, and then of course when shooting with the larger format I'd wondered about slower film in 35mm. Some very good results with Ilford's new Delta 400 prompted me to do a direct comparison shooting the same subject on Delta 400 35mm at EI 800 developed in Ilfosol-S 1:14 and Delta 3200 6x7 at EI 1600 developed in Ilfosol-S 1:9.
Ilfosol-S and Delta 400 seem rather well-matched. I'm using the 1:14 dilution so development times are sufficiently long in this summertime's high temperatures. Ilfosol-S has given the finest grain and best sharpness I've seen with Delta 3200, while the real speed is a little lower than DD-X etc.
Delta 400 at EI 800 and Delta 3200 at EI 1600 fairly closely match in curve shape, densities etc, but charts and graphs aren't where it's at for this comparison. I photographed a real live human being at f2 in 35mm and f2.8 in 6x7.
The resulting 8x10 prints are a bit of a shock. They're just about identical. Tonal rendition, grain, sharpness, "clarity"....are virtually the same.
The bottom line is that I've found that while I won't lose anything by shooting in either format, I won't gain anything by shooting 6x7 D3200 at EI 1600, while otoh with 35mm D400 at EI 800 I'd gain using a much smaller, lighter, faster-to-work-with camera. I'll extrapolate that shooting 6x4.5 or 6x6 (cropping) would give _worse_ results than 35mm.
And that just plain amazes me.