Looking back over this I'm actually not sure we're talking about the same film. I like SFX a lot. It's a traditional black and white film (in terms of developme

Looking back over this I'm actually not sure we're talking about the same film. I like SFX a lot. It's a traditional black and white film (in terms of development chemistry, there's no mention of C-41 chemistry on the technical sheet). Did you mean XP2? Anyway, here's my take on "black and white" C-41 films: I just don't see the point. Traditional black and white film is a beautiful thing. From an aesthetic and technical standpoint it's far and away better than C-41. The only advantage C-41 has is the ability to drop it off at a corner lab, and those are becoming more rare by the day. I'd much rather just shoot a high quality true color negative film and convert it. I don't do that very often but I'd be kind of surprised if you couldn't get a better looking image from converting, say, Portra, than shooting a "black and white" color negative film. Every time I've tried films like XP2 an whatever the Kodak equivalent was, the results have been resoundingly underwhelming.