Delta 3200

Delta 3200 is the grain monster of the list. The crystals are large core shell tabular grains, and a push makes the clumps larger still, so the grain is visible in a small print and dominant in a big one. It is the stock to name when the grain is the subject.

It is also the stock for light that is not really there. A dark bar, a stage, a gym at night: Delta 3200 gives a picture where a slower film gives nothing. The price is that the picture has grey blacks, no clean white and very little fine detail.

Describe the grain physically. Ask for huge clumping grain that breaks up the mid greys. Clumping is the word that matters, because the grain gathers into visible lumps rather than spreading evenly the way Tri-X grain does.

Skin dissolves. At a normal print size a face reads as a shape and a tone, not as a surface: pores go, fine lines go, and the grain sits where the texture used to be. Ask for skin dissolving into grain and the model stops trying to render a clean face.

Contrast is low, so say grey blacks and no clean white. A night sky comes back as a grainy grey rather than as black, and an overcast daytime sky comes back flat. For speed, the real box speed is about 1000, the usual rating is 3200, and the stock still prints at 6400 and 12500 with the shadows gone.

Use it for a stage, a bar, a night street, a gym, a party, a back room. Use it also when a clean picture would be the wrong picture and the grit is the message.

Leave it alone in daylight and in any picture that needs detail: a landscape, a product, a face in good light. There is no way to ask for Delta 3200 and a sharp clean result at once.

Push processing is the darkroom step, and it is a separate entry in this catalogue. A push makes any stock grainier and harder. Delta 3200 is a film built around that step, so it starts where a pushed Tri-X ends and it keeps its low contrast while it gets there.

Cinema publishes Film Grain at /techniques/cinema/ as its own entry. That entry adds grain over a finished picture. Delta 3200 changes what the picture is: the grain removes detail rather than lying on top of it, and the tone curve goes flat at the same time.

Ilford introduced Delta 3200 in 1998, built on the core shell crystal technology it had used for Delta 100 and Delta 400. Its datasheet gives a nominal speed of ISO 1000 and lists development times as far as EI 25000 in DD-X and Microphen. It sells in 35mm and 120, and it became the standard film for concert and available light reportage in the years before digital sensors got fast.

The model returns high ISO digital noise: fine, even, coloured speckle. Say clumping film grain, not digital noise, and say the clumps are large enough to break up the mid greys.

The second failure is deep rich blacks. Delta 3200 does not have them. Say grey blacks, low contrast and no clean white anywhere in the frame.