Film Friday - December 22nd, 2023. Ilford Delta 3200.

Ilford Delta 3200 is a lovely film known for its ultra high speed, relatively sharpness (despite that high speed), graininess, lenient latitude and reasonable contrast. It is a beautiful film that has been around since 1998… and it is available in 35mm and 120! So let us dig in to Delta 3200.

The singular defining trait of Delta 3200 is its super high speed. Advertised at a box speed of 3200, it is one of the fastest films on the market, only rivaled by Kodak’s TMax P3200 and Delta does P3200 one better by also being available in 120 format. Now if only they made it in 4x5… This high speed allows the clever photographer a whole new range of possibilities and it has proven an especially popular film in the music business where photographers often have to work without flash and tripod. But it naturally makes a great film for general low light photography where your goal is to shoot handheld and relatively discretely (no bright flash popping off with each shot). We would recommend yet another use to consider though and that is for cameras with naturally slow maximum apertures. Think of not just the Holga and Diana, but the plethora of compact point and shoot cameras as well. Many medium format cameras in general have f2.8 as their fastest available aperture and quite a few are as slow as f4 or f5.6. In these cameras Delta 3200 can make a very versatile every-situation film. It will give you the freedom to walk around during the day and then hop into a museum or down into a subway station. You don’t necessarily need to be out at night to find dimmer levels of illumination to work in.

Having said this, you may have heard the recommendation that you actually shoot Delta 3200 at ISO 1600 or even ISO 1000. The film is nominally an ISO 1000 film and gets its 3200 speed essentially from push processing. This is all true. In fact, here at Blue Moon Camera we often tell customers to shoot this film at ISO 1600 and if you do want to shoot it at ISO 3200 we recommend pushing it a stop beyond the suggested developing times. In our experience, while Delta 3200 is capable of its advertised 3200 speed, it also tends to underexpose very, very easily at that speed in many developers. Ilford heavily recommends DD-X as the best developer for Delta 3200, and in that developer it seems to hold up to its ISO 3200 rating pretty well. Historically we used Kodak developers in our darkroom, both XTOL and D-76, and Delta 3200 seemed to really benefit from the extra stop of exposure it gets from being shot at ISO 1600. We have since moved over to DD-X and it has worked wonders with Delta 3200, really allowing good negative density at its fastest speed. But take all this with a grain of silver salt because the darkroom is a magical place and different films respond in different developers differently. Your mileage can vary. Still, if you are using Kodak developer you’d be wise to give it that bit of extra exposure if you can afford to.

Indoor wedding receptions are commonly dimly lit, the extra speed that Delta 3200 offers can be a lifesaver. In addition this image was made with a Holga that naturally has a max aperture of f8. As it was, this was a 2 second exposure and it would have been much longer with a slower film.

Don’t think of Delta 3200 as strictly a nighttime or indoor film. It is quite capable at all times of the day and can be especially useful in the late afternoon when the shadows lengthen and you still need to capture fast action. Image made with a Fuji 6x9.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Delta 3200 does pretty well in the reciprocity failure department. Even though its faster speed is meant to help you with faster shutter speeds should you need to really drag your shutter with Delta 3200 an average amount of compensation will do just fine. Figure on giving the film an extra stop by the time you reach 10 second exposures - meaning you really should be exposing for 20 seconds instead. After that the film creeps up to needing two stops additional exposure by the time you get up to a calculated exposure time of about 60 seconds (if this confuses think of it this way; if your metered/calculated exposure is 1 minute you should be exposing for 4 minutes instead). This is pretty reasonable, neither a great nor a terrible performance in this regard. Then again, with that ultra high film speed you probably won’t be pushing this too much… unless you want to do some nighttime pinhole work.

And then there is Delta 3200’s grain. After its film speed, its graininess is probably the next thing you will be noticing with this film. Yes, it is grainy. It is the cost of having that really high film speed. Then again, it is a tabular grained film in the same vein as the TMax films so the grain pattern is much smoother and therefore less apparent than you might think, especially if you are shooting this in 120. We have made the argument before that grain is not a bad thing. It is the building blocks of a film image and thus comparable to seeing the brush strokes in a painting. Grain can be beautiful at its best. Yes, sometimes it can be a distraction in the image and it is not a quality you always want with every photo, but more often than not we love seeing the grain of the film. With Delta 3200 you will get to see that grain aplenty. Our advice is to try a roll of this film not for its speed but for its grain. Make a point to go shoot something that you want to be gritty and textured. Shoot because of the grain and not around it.

A 35mm Delta 3200 image shows its usefulness in dim light and helps give you an idea of its grain. Image made with a Pentax Super Program.

And more of that Delta 3200 grain. See how nice that can look? Image made with a Pentax Super Program.

Lastly, let us turn to Delta 3200’s contrast and latitude. We would describe this film as being low contrast, especially compared to TMax P3200. If you want big grain and deep contrast, go with the TMax but if you are after a softer, smoother result then stick with the Delta 3200. In doing our research online we saw varying opinions on whether Delta 3200 is a high or low contrast film - a lot of variance actually. For as long as we have been working with the film it has always presented itself as a lower contrast film with great latitude and pretty decent tonal range. Since what one does in the darkroom to develop this film can have a huge impact on how much contrast the resulting negatives have (not to mention corrections in scanning) we will simply tell you our experience with it and remind you that your mileage may differ depending on how it is developed and then scanned. Circling back to its tonal range, if shot at ISO 3200 its shadows do have a tendency to underexpose and not hold much detail, so if shadow detail is important to you feed this film a bit more exposure or, as we said above, rate it at the slower ISO 1600.

And that about sums it up for Delta 3200. It really cannot be overstated how valuable it is to have an ISO 3200 capable medium format film out there still on the market. But beyond its 120 availability, Delta 3200 has a lot of other great things going for it. Browsing back through our negatives digging up sample images for this Friday we were surprised at just how much Delta 3200 all of us here have shot over the years. It always pays to have a roll of this tucked away in your camera bag for those unexpectedly dim scenarios or when the batteries in your flash die.

We always keep this film in stock in both 35mm and 120. Even better we introduced it to our regular Spy Film rotation last fall so now your Minox cameras can benefit from that extra speed.

To buy a roll of Delta 3200 from our website in 35mm or 120, simply click right here.
But if you are a super sneaky spy photographer we have a special link to the Spy Film version here.

Nothing like Delta 3200 to capture the ambiance of a dimly-lit show. Image made with a Pentax Super Program.

It was less creepy than it looks.

Easily a daytime film too. Image made with a Lomo LC-A 120.

That’s all for this week folks. Image made with a Nikon F3 and 8mm Nikkor-Fisheye.

We were testing out a Pentax 67 with a homemade projector lens mounted onto it that had a really slow fixed aperture. Delta 3200’s speed was perfect for handholding some test shots. Shot at ISO 3200.