Fujifilm’s Acros black-and-white film is restarting production, the Japanese film giant has confirmed.
The film, a 100-ISO film which was discontinued in August 2018, has been reformulated in order to avoid supply issues with certain ingredients in the original recipe.
The film will be known as Fujifilm Neopan 100 Acros II and will be available later this year, EMULSIVE has reported via an official Fujifilm press release in Japanese.
Acros was an extremely fine-grained emulsion that was particularly popular with still life, landscape and wedding photographers.
The press release reads: “The newly developed NEOPAN 100 ACROS II is an ultra-high-quality black-and-white film with ISO 100 sensitivity, with the world’s highest level of graininess, three-dimensional tone reproduction, and excellent sharpness. It is suitable for shooting in a wide range of fields, such as product photos and architecture photos, as well as long-exposure celestial and night-shot photographs.”
There is no indication yet what the price of the film will be.
Kosmo Foto was one of the blogs which reported rumours of the film’s axing early last year, following information from Fujifilm’s information in documents to dealers.
Fujifilm’s Neopan range also boasted 400 and 1600-ISO films, both of which have been discontinued. A C-41 process “black-and-white” film called Neopan 400CN is still in production.
Fujifilm has gradually pruned its roster of stills films as it pivots away from consumer film products. It’s traditional film products are now thought to make up around 1% of the company’s turnover.
In recent years Fujifilm has dropped such popular films as Provia 400 slide film, Reala 100 pro-level print film and its range of Sensia consumer slide films.
The announcement that Acros is to return reverses this downward trend.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Interesting reversal for Fuji, there is mention of changing the chemicals, I wonder whether c41 will have any part in the new mix?
In similar vein, it would be great if they would bring back their medium format rangefinder film cameras.
Fuji loves us again 🙂
Best news of 2019. My hear loves that film a lot.