Long time ago expired film

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

I bought ten roll B&W film they are expired in 1979 Laughing

from 25 ASA to 200 ASA ORWO and Forte made ones. I bought them for practice how new camera loading works , but I am curious about their performance. I did try once long expired B&W result was garbage no contrast just gray everywhere. Any experience ?

rawhead · Expire: 2014-04-29

I guess depends largely on how it was stored. E.g., here's a shot from a buddy of mine. Expired 1978 Smile

Untitled by Jonathan Hillhouse, on Flickr

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

Wow! So I will give it a try again.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

I have kept a bunch of rolls of Kodak Plus-X Pan in the freezer ever since I bought them in about 1990. Their expiration was 1983, and the only reason why I bought them was the guy promised me that they had been frozen since expiration. For no particularly good reason, I've kept them frozen and haven't used them ever since I bought them until last year, at which time I began exposing a few rolls. Much to my surprise, they were just fine. I developed them myself using D76 developer and used the recommended developing times that were included on the data sheets that came with each roll. The only effect from aging I've noticed is the film has a rather pronounced curl, or perhaps "cupping" would be a more accurate term, which may lead to a somewhat soft scan unless the film is flattened in some fashion first. Despite this cupping, scans with my Epson 4990 have shown good results. Here are a couple of samples.

Canon F-1, Canon FD 35-105mm f/3.5, Yashica Pro 50-DX flash

Canon FTbn, Canon FL 55mm f/1.2

So if the film has been stored frozen, I would say that it should be good. But if it hasn't? Well, all bets are off in that case.

Excalibur · Expire: 2014-04-21

My 35mm HP5 and FP4 from 1986, stored at room temperature was OK when used this year, also 120 FP4 from 1990 is OK.

berraneck · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2010 11:12 am Post subject:

BW films are often still good when stored at cold place or frozen. Problems are with colour films, especially slides - i have bought some Kodak E100 slides expired in 1992, which aren´t good at all for general photography. On the other side, they´re very recommendable for cross-processing when shooting lomo-style:)

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

Xpres · Expire: 2014-10-28

There might be some loss in speed after 30 years. I tried a roll of HP3 that expired in 1964 but it had lost about 3 stops and and was very foggy. Still got some images though.

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

Mine previous try was foggy too, let we see this one.